Website redesign testing environment

[jdossetti]

An external company is redesigning our website. They have a draft version active in a folder on their website to enable us to view it (example: www.externalcompanywebsite.com/ourwebsite/). There is no permission required to view the website, anyone with the url could just go there.

I am not sure if they're using the robots.txt to block crawlers, or if they're blocking specific ip addresses.

If the engines are allowed to crawl their website and they index pages of our draft website, does that affect our website negatively in the future once we host it on our domain?

[ak1lz]

If they put up new content, and that content is the same you will be using.. make sure they take it down soon after you approve of the design. Otherwise I don't think there will be any problem for your website.

Only thing I can think of would be duplicate content.

[jessential]

It may depend on how the host of the draft version has it set up.

For example, Adobe Business Catalyst settings automatically block all test sites from being crawled by search engines.

Can you inquire if the search engines are allowed to crawl their archived or draft site? I have also been amazed at how many times someone puts a "back up" copy somewhere else on line.  Opening up the discussion may save you duplicate content troubles ahead.