Handling alternate domains

[seanginnaw]

Hi guys,

We're noticing a few alternate hostnames for a website rearing their ugly heads in search results and I was wondering how everyone else handles them. For example, we've seen:

• alt-www.(domain).com
• test.(domain).com
• uat.(domain).com

We're looking to ensure that these versions all canonical to their live page equivalent and we're adding meta robots noindex nofollow to all pages as an initial measure. Would you recommend a robots.txt crawler exclusion to these too?

All feedback welcome!

Cheers,

Sean

[ViviCa1]

Hi, no don't add the crawler exclusion as this will not prevent Google from indexing them, but it will prevent Google from seeing the no-index and canonicals tags (seeing as it won't crawl the pages anymore).

[seanginnaw]

Awesome. Thanks!