Accidental indexing of a test/dev mirror domain

[chrisandsarah]

Hi

Google has indexed about 500,000 legit pages from our domain.
The problem is my wife noticed today that google has also indexed around 1,500 duplicate pages from a www2.ourdomain.com address, which i think was an old test/dev server my host setup for us once, but its still a mirror of our live site, with exact matching pages.

Our host says its okay and that google will know the www2 is duplicate and not meant to be indexed and will eventually drop the 1,500 ww2 pages.

Of course, our worry is that this will get our 500,000 legit pages dropped if somethings not done!? are we right to be concerned? In fact, we think it could be contributing to some low rankings of late.

Thanks for any info or advice, or experiences in the matter

[bwnbwn]

By all means get the stuff blocked and blocked now put.I assume the ww2 has the home page and all so yes this could be a reason why chance anything.

Block it all in robots.txt today then if possible have added to

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

get this out of the index Google is bad but yahoo and msn are far worse and if Google has 1500 chanches are the whole thing has been spidered...

Point in case nothing is safe always always first thing you do when working on anything you don't want indexed is add the meta tag.

Had this happen as well learned the hard way as you are doing...Sorry to hear this it is not a good thing don't take it lightly it is very very seriouss....Get this taken care of today do not delay.

[chrisandsarah]

Thanks for the info. I've now got him to remove the www2 site completely, as it was no longer being used anyway. I just hope its not too late. Regarding yahoo, our site has not been indexed (apart from one page) for a couple of years now

[ann]

Go to webmaster tools and get it recognized then show the url you want it known as.

[BradleyT]

Go to webmaster tools and get it recognized then show the url you want it known as.

Are you saying that in webmaster tools if you have 2 domains verified you can then tell google which one you want displayed if they happen to have duplicate content?

[phranque]

it is called setting your preferred domain [google.com].

[tedster]

Setting your preferred domain in Webmaster Tools is a good backup strategy, but Google offers no guarantees on that approach - so I would still suggest putting a robots.txt Disallow rule on www2.