Demo website not blocked

[member22]

My webmaster is currently working on my website. He downloaded our live website and uploaded it on his demo server to work on it.

I typed the demo server web address in google
site: mywebmaster.demoserver.com and I just realized he didn't block google from indexing it and we now have our website on his demo server indexed by google at this address : mywebmaster.example.com.com/ourwebsite

I was wondering if that can hurt our seo or not ?

Thank you,

[edited by: brotherhood_of_LAN at 2:27 pm (utc) on Oct 23, 2013]
[edit reason] exemplified domain [/edit]

[netmeg]

Well, yea.

I'd get him to block it as soon as possible. The first thing I do with dev sites is put a password on it. If his demo server in in GWT, then he should maybe take a look there too.

[member22]

Netmeg

Thank you for your reply but what can happen if he doesn't block it ?

[netmeg]

Lots of duplicate content. There's all kinds of ramifications from that (search here for duplicate content)

Basically, if he won't block it, then find another developer.

[member22]

Aren't duplicate content issue when the domain name is the same?

In my case the domain name is different, there is mydomain.com and the developer.com/mydomain

[netmeg]

No, duplicate content means duplicate content, regardless of domain. Seriously, get that other site blocked.

[mrengine]

Essentially your site has been scraped. Although some say scrapers don't hurt your ranks in Google, they do. Get your designer to block the demo site and ask him/her to remove from Google's index with their webmaster tools account.

[FranticFish]

Regardless of what Google might say about duplicate content and filtering out dupes, I've seen it tank rankings on a number of occasions. I've been involved in a number of 'help! everything's gone wrong!' scenarios where the answer was a dupe copy of the website somewhere (either the client set it up with another developer, or on another domain, or a .co.uk instead of the .com or it was a dev site that wasn't blocked etc etc).

As others have said, do not take that risk. It's SO avoidable, and SO not worth it.