Beta Site Removal best practices

[bgvsiteadmin]

Hi everyone.
We are doing a CMS migration and site redesign with some structural changes. Our temporarily Beta site (one of the staging environments and the only one that is not behind firewall) started appearing in search. Site got indexed before we added robots.txt due to dev error (at that time all pages were index,follow due to nature of beta site, it is a final stage that mirrors live site)

As an remedy,  we implemented robots.txt for beta version as :

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

Removed beta form search for 90 days. Also, changed all pages to no index/no follow . Those blockers will be changed once code for beta get pushed into production.

However,

We already have all links redirected (301) from old site to new one. this will go in effect once migration starts (we will go live with completely redesigned site that is now in beta, in few days). After that, beta will be deleted completely and become 404 or 410.  So the question is, should we delete beta site and simple make 404/410 without any redirects (site as is existed for only few days ).

What is best thing to do, we don't want to hurt our SEO equity. Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you!

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi There,

I am sorry to hear about your situation, I have experienced this often as developers used to forget to add Robots.txt or they would use the wrong setting for no-follow no-index meta. We experienced that Google was able to detect the live version was current and updated one; as we would be working on it more often once the website was launched. We tried both methods but beta version 301 created more complications than providing solutions as we had to keep it updated along the lines of live website. After we realized that live version was being valued and given authority by Google, we never tried to pass authority from beta websites as that would complicate the things further.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Vijay

[JohnSammon]

Hey there! Is the beta site on a subdomain or in a subdirectory of the new site? We typically build our dev sites on subdomains. If you do, I have some good feedback for you on this. Let me know! Thanks!

[bgvsiteadmin]

Hi John,

Beta is on sub domain. Beta.domain.com .

Beta site is removed from search for 90 days and we are trying to null any traces of it after migration is over.

Thank you

[JohnSammon]

One thing that you may want to try is to sync up a Google Search Console profile to that subdomain and then ask Google to remove the URL's from it's listing to help speed up the process.

Google treats domains and subdomains differently. I wouldn't worry about redirecting the subdomain beta URL's to the main site as they were just indexed and have no value. Just focus on the no-indexing and you should be fine.

Also, I'd check and see if the dev site got indexed in Bing and do the same thing with Bing Webmaster Tools.

I hope that helps!

John

[bgvsiteadmin]

Great point.

I am planing to 404 beta so after some time all indexation will be dropped. Thank you so much!