Develpoment Site Outscoring Real Site

Site:dev.domain.com producing way too many results.

[FrogOfPower]

We've currently got a dev.domain.com site as a developement site to try stuff out on, which is pretty much a duplicate of www.domain.com. On MSN the dev. site is listed as having 11,000 pages when the main site has only 3,000 listed. I estimate there are actually around 4,000 pages in total on the website. Once I remove the dev. site will the main site score better and why did it get so many listings in the first place, particuluarly with next to no inbound links?

[inbound]

Surely you should be more concerned with the dev site being spiderable as it may become a concern on all engines soon. It should not be available to the robots in the first place. Google will not like such a setup as it will see 'duplicate content' all over the place.

As for the original point, your main site should rank better without the dev competing with it, no-one can say when though.

[FrogOfPower]

I'm already in the process of removing it, google's not spotted it yet and I obviously want it kept that way. Yahoo's found a couple of pages on it, I'm just amazed MSN has indexed 11,000 pages. It will be removed soon, so I'll update if there was any effect.

[stinkfoot]

MSN lies about the number of pages it has indexed to a large extent. I dont quite understand why but there we go. Other search engines also do the same but hide that fact by saying sorry you asked for listing 10001 and we only list 10000.

Besides after 1000 listings on a site isnt that enough? Information rich societies ... I ask ya.

[tictoc]

Just another example of sub-domain duplicates and spam taking over the serps! Not saying your site is spam just saying its a good example of MSN valuing sub-domains better than regular domains!