Site redesign what to consider to avoid any issues

[edward-may]

Hi GUYS

I want to avoid getting myself into a bad situation with google, so I'm just wanting to know if there are any steps I would need to take whilst I'm redesigning and developing my site as I'm currently deploying our new designs.

One thing I noticed, i have my new designs and content on our development server to run through any checks before deploying it to the live environment, however while our live site is up, I have duplicate content on the live site that exactly matches the dev site for obvious reasons but do I need to tell google that the dev site is for development purposes only so google knows I'm not duplicating content?

I have searched around to find some more info about this, if anyone has some insight i would be glad to know your thoughts.

Thank you in advance

[VicMarcusNWI]

When we went through a similar process for our company last year, we set up a development site under a sub-domain and no-indexed all the pages under it. That prevented any duplicate content issues for us. Once going live, we allowed indexing and following of certain pages.

Another way to do it is to edit your robots.txt and disallow all access to the development site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

[edward-may]

Perfect! Thanks so much Vic Marcus!

[Alick300]

Hi Justin,

IMO first you need to noindex to your test site (new design site) .Please add following code in header of every page

It's important to know that

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

is to block the site in the Robots.txt file is not sufficient. The meta-tags are the important part. If you skip those and only use robots.txt your site could still end up being crawled.

You are looking for step by step Guide so I'm sharing two very informative articles in case of redesign website for SEO purpose

1>http://moz.com/blog/how-to-avoid-an-seo-disaster-when-changing-your-website

2>http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/06/02/how-to-retain-at-least-95-of-your-organic-traffic-after-a-site-redesign/

Hope it helps you.

Thanks

[edward-may]

wow, thanks so much guys! I definitely needed a step by step guide to give my developer! Once these have been done, how would I go about checking and making sure that its all been done correctly by my developer?

[Alick300]

Hi Justin,

This time also I'm sharing an article on this because there are several checkpoints . Please check below article

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/

Hope this helps.

thanks

[VicMarcusNWI]

Glad to help, Justin. Also, remember when you go live with the site to take the development site offline or secure it in a way where regular web traffic can't get to it. Otherwise you risk visitor confusion.

[thewebguy3]

What I usually do is  set the website up on a staging area set up at example.com   and modify my local host file with the ip address of the staging area with domain and access the site via example.com