How to Prevent Your Staging or Development Site from Indexing

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a web developer is failing to implement proper preventative measures to block search engines such as Google or Bing from mistakenly crawling and indexing your clients’ staging or development web sites. These are sites that are still a work in progress and therefore contain sensitive content that’s either incomplete or not yet polished enough to be released for public consumption. It can include things like upcoming promotions, product launches, company policy changes, and other kinds of information that a company’s competitors shouldn’t be able to prematurely obtain. Failing to secure this information and protect it from skilled hackers can lead to a great deal of potential hardship for you and your clients down the line either by causing content to be prematurely leaked or worse, it could end up in the wrong hands. To protect yourself and your company’s sensitive information during the development phase of your web site, you should hire a professional SEO company in Toronto to build your web site or maintain your existing one.
Here are a few important techniques offered by professional web design services in Toronto:

Creating the Local DNS

The first step when it comes to building a secure web site is to create a unique domain name server or local DNS, which is added into an Internet directory and converted into what’s known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address. This will come in handy later on while you’re working on the staging site because you’ll be able to put directives in place on the robot.txt that can grant access or deny access to specific IP addresses.

Block Search Engines on a Test Site

Search engines have certain practices such as crawling in place with the sole purpose of preventing content from being duplicated on multiple web sites. This is mostly to prevent and identify possible copyright infringement and plagiarism. The main problem faced by web developers is that search engines are incapable of differentiating between staging sites and sites that have already gone live. As a result, when your web site does actually go live, the content on it might be mistaken as a duplicate and your client will inevitably be penalized by the search engine or the content will be removed without immediate action.

Htaccess Login

One of the best practices recommended by SEO experts in Toronto using a WordPress or any other preferred web domain is to set up an Htaccess login that’s only accessible to a few authorized personnel until the web site is ready to go live. It’s even inadvisable to provide your client with the login credentials until the web site is ready to launch. This is an effective security measure that can help prevent even the most experienced and persistent hackers from breaking down barriers to access your unfinished web site.
Numero Uno Web Solutions is one of the premier SEO services in Canada. We’ve helped countless clients improve their search engine optimization practices in Toronto and all throughout Canada. Our client base even extends to various regions within the United States. To learn more about our web design and SEO services, please contact us today!