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Here's the problem. Google indexed the development site - the site does relatively well in coming up within google but it's the wrong site.
I brought this on myself by accidentally leaving some hard-coded links to the development site in the live client site. By the time I realized that, however, it was too late. Google had already indexed my development site.
I'm now thinking that my client is maybe being penalized for having content that is identical to my development site's content and that Google gave preference to the pages it indexed first - i.e. those on the development site.
What can I do to fix this problem? How do I get the development site pages out of the index? How do I get the real site do appear in place of the pages that are coming up in SERP? (Both sites are in the index, but the development site is doing better than the real site. Ugh.)
But seriously, anybody have any thoughts on this predicament?
My client's traffic has plunged 50% because traffic that would be going to her goes to the development site instead. Will this get fixed in the next re-index?
Do you currently have two versions of the site online, both indexed by Google, the development one and the clients?
Your post disappeared in the florida update stuff. Things have calmed down... you should get some answers now.
Killing the development site would be a start, so that each page request returned a 404. This would ensure that all development pages were removed from the index.
However, you could use a 301 redirect for each page instead, redirecting a request for a page on the development to the same page on the live domain. This should knock out the development pages, and point Googlebot over to the page which should replace it.
JP
What you need to do now.
1. Put a robots.txt file in all your development sites that turns away all bots.
2. Copy over your dev envir to a new place. This is now your dev envior.
3. In the indexed dev envior redirect all request to the appropriate prod page, being sure to also include any q string param's.
4. Include in the redirect a / 301 moved permanently header in this redirect from your new redirect site (formerly your dev site).
5. Each time you make a new dev envior first make sure you have the robots.txt that disallows all bots.
6. Make sure the dev server that has your new redirect site doesn't go down until it is out of the index.
7. Forgive yourself and don't mention to anyone again that you were this big of a lunk head.
This seems to be working itself out.
I deleted all the dev server pages. Google is gradually getting rid of them. The production server pages are gradually entering the SERPs. Hopefully, Google is intelligent enough not to maintain any residual penalty for the duplicate content that resulted from the overlap period.
