Staging site cached referring links to main domain

[luckyadirake]

Hi everyone,

I need some help, Google search console is reporting in the links section that there are huge number of links being referred to a live domain website from a staging environment,

The web developer have already removed brand.staging.com site completely already and its now serving as 500 , but google are still caching them and it has links referred to brand.com , Our ranking has dropped dramatically since google algorithm update, do you think this can be one of the reasons, if so should i ask the developer to re verify the domain in search console and use removal tool for removing cached urls ? Because google is still seeing cached version since december

Can anyone suggest me please

[JayDub]

A 500 is an "internal server error" header, so Google doesn't know the site was intentionally removed, because the message it's getting from the server is "something's wrong internally, so I can't send the page". Requesting the developer to use the removal tool and serve a 410 Gone will send the message the pages are no longer there and have been intentionally removed. I would request the change from a "something's not working right" error header (500) to a "hey we removed all these pages" gone (410) header to make sure the correct message is sent.

In the future, locking the dev/staging site behind password protection is a better answer, because it would have been much better if what could easily look like spammy/manipulative links were not found in the first place.

[lucy24]

Did you mean literally 500, or just 500-class? In some situations, as when you've briefly taken the site down for remodeling, a 503 (“Service Unavailable”) can be appropriate. But 500-even should be reserved for bona fide errors.

[luckyadirake]

@lucy24+ yes. its 500 server error, as site was removed

@JayDub, so u would recommend me to reverify the site on console and use removal tools to remove cached urls ?

[JayDub]

Reverifying and using the removal tool would be the fastest solution, but simply serving a 410 Gone header for the site rather than the server error would have the same effect and should be served if you do decide to verify it and use the removal tool anyway ... I would probably verify it and remove it just to get it done and over with asap personally unless that's more of a headache than just serving a 410 Gone header, then I would just skip to the Gone.

Something like this in the .htaccess should do it:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^ - [G]