Creating duplicate site for testing purpose. Can it hurt original site

[Modi]

Hello,

We are soon going to upgrade the cms to latest version along with new functionlaities - the process may take anywhere from 4 week to 6 weeks.

may suggest - we need to work on live server, what we have planned

• take exact replica of site and move to a test domain, but on live server

• Block Google, Bing, Yahoo - User-agent: Google Disallow: /   , User-agent: Bing Disallow: /  User-agent: Yahoo Disallow: / in robots.txt

• Will upgrade CMS and add functionality - will test the entire structure, check url using screaming frog or xenu and move on to configure the site on original domain

The process upgradation and new tools may take 1 - 1.5 month....

Concern is that despite blocking Google, Bing & Yahoo through User agent disallow - can still the url can be crawled by the search engines - if yes - it may hurt the original site as will read on as entire duplicate or is there any alternate way around.. Many thanks

[RobertFisher]

Gagan

I think this is a great and interesting question. First, you are adding functionality, etc. to a site and you are curious as to the effect of that on visitors to the site once they are on it. This is data anyone in SEO should want to see for their sites.

I would first say that you need to define the test period (assuming you already know what you want to measure) for the site. If it is a week for example, I do not think you need worry about whether a site with three major engines blocked will in some way run into duped content issues. (NOTE: If this is a large site and/or one with a critical revenue need - one that cannot afford to have any type of slight but temporary downturn - I would look for another way to test the changes. Even if I was sure there were no other issues.)

I am assuming that if an ecommerce site for example, there will be the ability for a shopper to purchase on both, etc.

I would not run the test for any long period of time for a site that creates leads, revenue, etc. as I think it could cause customer confusion which can be more critical than duped content.

Let us know how it works out,

Thanks

[Modi]

Ahaa.. Thanks Mr. Robert for your views

However, does any kind of duplicate url can still occur - can google can still crawl the url despite been blocked through robots - can the original running site can suffer in any way, if we create duplicate site

Its a content based site - covering Auto reviews, updates with news, forum & blog updates. There is no ecommerce shopping or products involved

Our tentative time frame to add on features, test all changes and do major upgrade for latest version of cms will be approx 45 days. Do you feel any issue - if both original site and a duplicate one on test domain (despite blocked by robots), but on real time server goes on simultaneously for that period.

Also - you referred other way of testing changes - is it possible to share them ?

[NDAY]

Hi Gagan,

Google are generally more than happy for sites to test new pages, layouts and functionality. They even have some free tools for that purpose.

Content Experiments

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?ref_topic=1745207&rd=1

I'm not sure about the viability of of using Content Experiments to test a whole new site, but it would be worth looking into.

Let us know how you get on.

Neil.

[iPullRank]

Hey Gagan,

So I think you're question is will content on your staging site still get indexed despite using robots.txt? The answer is yes, sometimes that does happen especially if a lot of people link to it. The best way to keep content out of the index would be to use the meta robots tag with noindex, nofollow. Search engines are much better about adhering to those than robots.txt.

Let us know if you run into any problems!

-Mike

[Modi]

Thanks, am using it through Password Protected & meta noindex tag

Its been kept out of search engine crawl !!