Having possible problems with rankings due to development website

[zakkyg]

Hi all,

I've got an interesting issue and a bit of a technical challenge for you.

It's a bit complicated to explain, but please bear with me.

We have a client website (http://clientwebsite.com) which we are having a hard time ranking in the past few months. Main keywords simply don't show up in Top100 searches, even though we are constantly building backlinks through Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc.

Normally, we use ahrefs to look at the client's website backlinks, but just today we used Majestic to look at the backlink profile and one backlink stood out.

This is a backlink from a development server (http://developmentwebsite.com) which redirects to http://clientwebsite.com
The developers who were working on the redesign of the client website, put it up on their server and forgot to delete it.
Also, the content inside the development website is almost identical with the client website.

We then checked to see if http://developmentwebsite.com is indexed.
It's not.

Although, inside the robots file http://developmentwebsite.com/robots.txt there's:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
The funny (and weird thing) is that http://developmentwebsite.com/ and all development website inner pages are not indexed in Google.

But if we go to http://developmentwebsite.com/inner-page, it doesn't redirect to the corresponding http://clientwebsite.com/inner-page, it's the same development website page URL and the pages even have links to the client website, but like I said, none of the pages of the development website are indexed, even though crawlers are allowed in the robots.txt's development website.

In your opinion, could this be the reason why we are having a hard time to rank the client website?

Second question is:
How do we approach in solving this issue?
Do we simply delete the whole http://developmentwebsite.com with all the inner pages?
Or should we do 301 redirrects on a per-page basis?

[ThomasHarvey]

I would do the redirect to be safe then in the future make sure you run noindex on any development sites.

[HiveDigitalInc]

Great question..

First... some of your rankings problem may be around this - "Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc."... at least 2 of those items carries some decent risk, the consequences of which would be "not ranking".   Have you checked search console to see if any manual actions exist?  Did you have rankings and they disappeared, or have you been unable to secure rankings in general?   Does the site currently get organic traffic, but just maybe on terms that you aren't targeting?

As far as the development site, this could easily be a separate issue from your rankings, and I would doubt this would cause significant rankings drops if the dev site isn't being indexed by Google.  Would you be lucky enough to have any type of access to this through a CMS login?  If so, you could easily verify the site in search console and see where things stand in terms of indexing.  Additionally, if you could access through the CMS, you might be able to change a few settings, such as canonical tags, "website" or discourage indexing (if wordpress), etc. .that would cause the site to begin redirecting to your clientwebsite.com or at least give the indication that it is a known copy..    Did you check the individual pages of the site to see if a meta tag is in place on the pages blocking robots?

Ultimately the easiest thing regarding the dev site would be to simply ask the dev company to remove the site...

Cheers,

Jake

[becole]

Zakkyg, as previously mentioned, the problem may be the "building backlinks through Guest Posts and Profile links, and the type of links that you're building to the site. I would take one step further and run the site's links through Link Research Tools' Link Detox to make sure that the links to the site are good links and you're not building any toxic links.

I would also immediately take down the development site completely. Make it deliver 404 error pages, with all URLs. There's no need to set up redirects at all. Since it is an old dev site, it really shouldn't have any traffic or links to it--so I would just remove it.

[Linda-Vassily]

You can also use Moz's Open Site Explorer to look at the spam scores of your incoming links.

[BlueprintMarketing]

You have to search and replace the new sites URLs with the same consistent URL not from the dev server then block the dev server.

1. search and replace the URLs in the new site.
2. block the developer site with a password

First things first take  Make sure you have all the images and code on the http://clientwebsite.com/

Then go to the new site and do a search and replace on all the URLs including the database.

Search for http://developmentwebsite.com & replace with http://clientwebsite.com

• https://www.funduc.com/search_replace.htm
• https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

After doing this.

Go on to the development site and block URLs by password-protecting your server directories

Place a password on the site preventing it from being indexed by anything or even accessed without using the password.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93708
• https://blogvault.net/how-to-block-google-from-indexing-your-wordpress-site/

You might want to check the header tags in the development site URLs. This would only be for curiosity you really want these things gone.

Did you check for

_(…)_
**X-Robots-Tag: noindex**
_(…)_

Or no index meta tag in the  section of your page:

Lastly, remove the offending URL's from Google if you must  & follow this guide when launching sites.

• https://pantheon.io/sites/default/files/perfect-website-launch-pantheon-ebook_0.pdf

I hope this helps,

Tom

[zakkyg]

Thanks, Jake. We've had the dev site removed.

As a side note, what link-building would you recommend if you think we should not be doing outreach / guest posting?

Cheers!

[HiveDigitalInc]

Recommending link development would be difficult without knowing more about your specific industry, competitive advantages, etc.

Generally speaking, you want to focus first on ensuring you have valuable assets capable of justifying new links to your site.  This would be a variety of content types depending upon your business, but can range from Free Advice and How To Guides, Data Insights, Tools/Widgets, Detailed comparison/reviews, Interviews and insights from industry through leaders, etc.    You can use methods like broken link building to identify new content opportunities that you can capitalize upon, or look at top linked pages on competitor sites to see the types of content that has earned their links.

Once you have established your linkable assets, you can begin the process of outreach and amplification to bring attention to those assets and earn natural links.  Of course, you can always reach out to other thought leaders, cited sources, etc... to encourage some additional sharing, linking, etc.

You can also do link profile comparisons to see if there are reputable outlets citing your competitors but not mentioning you.

Those are just a few examples off the top of my head.  If you have the resources to do link dev internally and just need strategy guidance, you should check out the Moz recommended list, as many of those agencies (I know ours does) will offer ad-hoc consultation to help your team get the systems in place to be successful with your link dev efforts.

Cheers,

Jake

[zakkyg]

Thank you Jake, will definitely give this some thought.... Appreciate the help.

[cklinkert]

the problem, might be about your template .