Search engines picking up our backend?

Developement site picked up

[financialhost]

We have our developement site being picked up by search engines, especially Yahoo.
We are concerned that this may lead to duplicate content penaltys, we don't even know how the robots managed to find the developement site - there are no known links live.

We do not want to loose visitors that might enter the dev site from search engines so are considering a redirect back to the main site, however because of our set up we can't do a 301 redirect. Would a 302 be safe?

We are considering password protecting the dev site are waiting for the indexed pages to be dropped.

Any advice on the best method?

[jdMorgan]

A 302 would *not* be safe. In fact, if your system won't support 301's, I'd suggest you either get it fixed or change systems -- That's going to be a major problem over time. If you use a 302 to address your present problem, it's possible that your entire site will be "seen" to have moved to the development system (sub)domain, and your search rankings may tank.

Over the past year, there have been hundreds and hundreds of posts here about problems [google.com] caused by 302 redirects.

You can either put up a robots.txt on the dev site to disallow all spiders from all pages, or password-protect the dev site (actually, it should be password-protected anyway, unless you want your competition looking at it for ideas.)

You're on the right track; Your company needs to get serious about the "infrastucture" of your site -- Robots.txt validation [searchengineworld.com] and server header [webmasterworld.com] verification, canonical URL standardization (301-redirecting www.example.com to example.com or vice-versa, so that only one site is seen to exist) -- stuff people avoid because they don't want to "get their hands dirty" in the machine.

Jim

[financialhost]

I know the points about 302's and why it should be a 301 and i have argued that point to our IT team for sometime, but they argue it can't be done because of our system.

We use a 404 page rewrite to make all dynamic urls static and apparently cold fusion mx won't allow 301's in this enviroment.

The robots.txt and password protected fixes is what i also recommended, i just wanted to see what other peoples opinions were on this issue.

Once mystery is how the spiders even managed to find the dev site, since it is not linked anywhere to our knowledge.

Do you think it might be possible they picked it up from the yahoo or google bar when we were on the site?