Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google

[melen]

While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built.  Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed.  What is the best way to solve this problem?  I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?

[jesse-landry]

That would be a good way to do it. The other way would be to block it in the robots.txt file on the root directory. Although be careful you aren't blocking both since it's a subdomain.

You could also add a noindex, nofollow tag to each dev page but then you have to remember to remove those when you push them live to your real domain.

I'd probably go with the Robots.txt option since using the redirect will not allow you to view the site live which I'm assuming would take away from the whole point of having this "staging" sub-domain.

[melen]

Unfortunately we took the site live before we realized that Google had somehow indexed the pages.  So I think adding the 301 redirects should solve the problem.  In the future I will add the noindex, no follow tag to each dev page.  I will also password protect the dev. site.

[jesse-landry]

Yes the 301 will solve it but not necessarily any quicker than the robots.txt update. It will still be indexed until Google crawls it again, which doesn't really matter too terribly (especially if you're redirecting)

Chances are your site won't populate for any high-volume keywords since it's new... And it would be de-indexed eventually if you blocked it from the robots. In any case, all of these options will work and you should be fine.

Good luck!

[melen]

Really my main concern is the duplicate content issue.  I think the 301 should solve it

[jesse-landry]

It definitely will.