Developer let staging site get indexed

[Rich Owings]

This is the latest wrinkle in a problem project, and I just want to see if I'm missing anything.

The developer didn't block Google from crawling a redesigned site -- http://staging.oooops.com (a made up name). Here's my tentative game plan...

• Set up sitewide redirect rules from http://staging.oooops.com to http://oooops.com
• Make sure all the other redirects are in place (e.g., http://oooops.com/old-page/ to http://oooops.com/new-page/)
• Make sure I maintain access to both http://staging.oooops.com/ and http://oooops.com/ in GSC
• As soon as it goes live, use https://search.google.com/search-console/settings/change-address to notify Google of the move from http://staging.oooops.com to http://oooops.com
• Watch GA & GSC for issues for a few weeks
• Have the devs get an SSL and redirect all HTTP URLs to HTTPS
• Once again, watch GA & GSC for issues for a few weeks

What am I missing?

 

[pony]

Is the staging site dead forever or will it be used again in the future?

If it will never be used again then I think your plan is sound. Canonical tags on the staging pages back to the main site may help.

 

[Rich Owings]

Great question. I suppose they could use it in the future to make changes. What is your concern there?

 

[pony]

I've just had bad experiences in the past making sitewide redirect rules, and then having to spend a bunch of time and effort untangling the mess afterwards when I realized I wanted to use those pages again.

Don't think it should be too big of an issue though.

 

[Rich Owings]

Well it's a great point. I'll need to be sure the devs are aware of that. Thanks!

 

[Tim Colling]

This is one of the "little things" that I appreciate about WPEngine's staging servers - they take care of ticking that box for you when you create a new staging instance.