Indexing of a test website occurs when a development or staging version of a page becomes publicly accessible and a search engine adds it to its index. There are two consequences. Complete duplication of the whole website arises, where the search engine may not choose the correct version, and at the same time unfinished content, test prices, or internal notes become accessible to the public. The solution is to protect the test environment with a password at the server level, which is more reliable than relying on a noindex tag or a disallow rule in the robots.txt file. Equally important is the opposite step when launching the live version – a blocking rule forgotten and carried over from the test environment is one of the most common reasons a new website stays out of search for weeks. It is worth including a check for the presence of a test version in the index as part of the procedure for every launch.
See also: Noindex and nofollow, Duplicate content, Robots.txt.
