Why is the Dev site indexing and not my actual Domain

[HLAS]

hi guys I had 2 word press sites built but since they went live a couple of things aren't working.

1.when I do a keyword search one of the sites comes back with the actual URL and when I do another keyword search for the same site the DEV site comes back indexed and not the actual URL.

2.  The other site originally started indexing with the DEV site and not the URL and the developer tried to fix it and now it doesn't index at all. Its been long enough time for it to index.

Both URL's are live when put into a browser.

Any advice would be great

Thanks

Jamie

[davebuts]

Hi Jamie,

It sounds like the dev site has been removed from index, which is good, but I would check two things straight away on the proper site:

1. Make sure your site doesn't have a meta robots "noindex" tags on each page
2. Make sure your site isn't blocking crawlers (including search engines) in robots.txt

If this is a WordPress site, check Settings > Reading and make sure that the box that says 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site' is unchecked.

If you aren't sure how to do any of this, send me a PM with the domain names and I'd be happy to take a quick look.

Cheers,

David

[David-Kley]

Looks like your dev didn't block the dev site while it was being created. That sucks.

This is easy to fix. Make sure you have an updated sitemap file with recent change dates, and all the final URLs added. Also, go through Google's webmaster tools and fetch each new URL that has been added. If you still have a dev directory or folder on the server, block this with robots.txt.

Sitemap example:

<url><loc>https://DOMAIN.com/subpage/</loc>

<lastmod>2016-09-26T04:14:14Z</lastmod></url>

<priority>1.0</priority> (or whatever priority you want to set for the URLs)

<changefreq>Daily</changefreq>

[HLAS]

Thanks David PMing you now.

[HLAS]

Thanks David.