Actually, what I said doesn't make sense. Did I mention I'm living in an allergy fog these days? :-)
Even if the production site references the staging site, the robots.txt on the staging site should discourage search engines from following it. On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 9:13 AM, Michael Gentry <[email protected]> wrote: > There is no robots.txt file on production, though, so the link will be > found there. I'll update it. > > > On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 9:08 AM, Andrus Adamchik <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> >> >> > On May 21, 2017, at 3:59 PM, Andrus Adamchik <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> > >> >> >> >> On May 21, 2017, at 3:48 PM, Michael Gentry <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >> >> >> That's the main change. I also added a link to the Staging CMS site >> since >> >> I had to dig that up (didn't know it offhand). >> > >> > Exposing staging links publicly and adding more weight to them by >> creating links from the main site will be bad for SEO (a link to a second >> copy of the site will confuse Google as to which is the primary page). Wish >> we had the ability to set <link rel="canonical"../> for each page to help >> Google. So maybe remove the <a> tag from that link, and simply keep the >> text? >> >> On the other hand, it seems that the CMS already takes care of it by >> automatically placing a restrictive robots.txt on staging containing this: >> >> User-agent: * >> Disallow: / >> >> So my worries may be misplaced, but since search engines are complete >> blackboxes, you can never be 100% sure :) >> >> Andrus > > >
