Query on sub domains and load balancing

My website has a few sub domains such as dev. and ref. for development aid

[farske]

Hi all,

My website has a few subdomains where the site is cloned from a (now) outdated snapshot of the main site for the purpose of development.

I noticed some of these sub domains are appearing in my backlinks list at ahrefs and I'm concerned they are affecting rankings?

To give specific anon examples it's like having.
webmasterworld.com
dev.webmasterworld.com
ref.webmasterworld.com
dua.webmasterworld.com

Then I'm getting some of my load balancing amazon server domains appearing as referrals which link to these dev/ref sites.

I am wondering what the best practice here would be to ensure that these subdomains do not impact my main site.
Could I get punished for "clones"?

Thanks for any advice, links, or insights :)

[not2easy]

Hello farske and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

You don't get punished for clones but your main site may be devalued by duplicate content. Sites (domains or subdomains or directories that are not for public consumption should be kept out of the public reach using permissions, passwords, X-Robots headers or other means. I would look at what is showing in your GSC account to get a look at how Google sees it.

Keep in mind that you might be allowing ahrefs access that others do not have. Your ahrefs backlinks list may not be the same as your GSC "backlinks" list, it is a 3rd party tool that offers information to its users.

[farske]

Hi not2easy,

Appreciate your quick response and thoughts.

Yes I'll double-check with the development team that we have the correct blocks from public reach.

[listentobrett]

I'd be asking your devs to put even just some basic http auth in front of the sub domains which aren't intended for public consumption. This is easy to do with a little bit of nginx/apache configuration, and it would totally stop bots picking up duplicate content. (I'd also be more confident that it will completely stop it, as opposed to just relying on robots.txt)

I'd also recommend this anyway - it's definitely not a good idea to have dev or staging sites publically available (unless maybe it's like a "beta." subdomain where you actively invite testing and feedback. If there are any issues (which do normally arise during development) you wouldn't want those available, generally speaking.