[SOLVED] Duplicate Test website - SEO risk?

[noesac]

Every week or so, I take my entire website and redeploy it on a physically separate Test server.

Is there any risk at all of Google picking up on this second site, thinking "hey there's a site with exactly the same content out there", and penalizing my original site as a result?

If so what is the best way to approach this? Should I lock my site behind a password protect? Should I change all the meta data after deploy? etc?


Cheers

[uddhava]

If the test website is in the same root folder as your production website, then it might be good to block spiders from acessing this subfolder.
Just add this line to the robots.txt :

Disallow /test-folder

And if the test site has a different domain you should not have to worry i think

[noesac]

Ok thanks will keep in mind for the future.

It's on a completely different server right now, do I need to do anything special?

[noesac]

If the test website is in the same root folder as your production website, then it might be good to block spiders from acessing this subfolder.
Just add this line to the robots.txt :

Disallow /test-folder

And if the test site has a different domain you should not have to worry i think

Great thanks for confirming:)

[Goldmaverick]

How do I do this. I have been looking for an explanation on how to duplicate prestashop sites.

[Timpet]

Just take it out of produktion at the test site, then google will only see the maintains page.

[Timpet]

How do I do this. I have been looking for an explanation on how to duplicate prestashop sites.

What do you mean by this?

[noesac]

If the test website is in the same root folder as your production website, then it might be good to block spiders from acessing this subfolder.
Just add this line to the robots.txt :

Disallow /test-folder

And if the test site has a different domain you should not have to worry i think

Great thanks for confirming:)

I just had a look at the one created by Prestashop, it has a semi-colon

Disallow: /test-folder

Will both formats work? (with or without a semi colon)

[jhnstcks]

If the test website is in the same root folder as your production website, then it might be good to block spiders from acessing this subfolder.
Just add this line to the robots.txt :

Disallow /test-folder

And if the test site has a different domain you should not have to worry i think

Thats only useful if the spiders follow robot.txt protocol, and not everyone does.

Personally i would probabaly put the site into maintenance mode and add myself as the ip address allowed to see the site.

[noesac]

If the test website is in the same root folder as your production website, then it might be good to block spiders from acessing this subfolder.
Just add this line to the robots.txt :

Disallow /test-folder

And if the test site has a different domain you should not have to worry i think

Thats only useful if the spiders follow robot.txt protocol, and not everyone does.

Personally i would probabaly put the site into maintenance mode and add myself as the ip address allowed to see the site.

How would I do this? Is this done via CPanel?

[jhnstcks]

Its all done through your admin>preferences page