I do a little (stress ‘little’) side work for a historical group that Christina’s mom used to be very active in. (active as in, ‘was once president of’). Anyway, I do web updates to their website, make a few reports about web traffic, and a few other simple things. Not bad work.
Well, a long while back I made a preview/beta version of their website available on 4101. I did it so they could take a look at some changes that, at the time, were going to be sorta major. It served the purpose well and life was good. I left the site there as an older backup and in case I wanted to use it again.
Flip forward a few months and I found out something both funny and sad at the same time. If you search for the name of the historical group in google, you get the 4101 beta site as the first link. The real website is second. I discovered this when my bandwidth started to jump from the beta site. (as in from 40mb a month to 400mb+) . I’ve updated the beta site to match the real site, and will continue to do so in the future.
Anyway, I thought it was funny. I imagine that if people from the group find out they will be less than amused.
How funny…. I suppose you did what you needed to do to make the real site findable and did nothing to make it findable oh your web page.
Instead of using the beta site as a mirror, can you redirect all non-internal (not you and not them) traffic to the primary site? And then put in the robots & meta no index no follow so that the beta site would fall off of google’s radar?
I’d hate for you to lose a testing site; those are very handy, and people in the group may be accustomed to it. And isn’t getting all those hits hurting your own bandwidth?
Also, it’s diluting their own traffic numbers, if so much traffic is coming in to your site – and that’s not good. Not bad like your site getting hammered, but still not good.
And yeah, figure out what it is about your site that makes it the primary hit. Whatever that is, it’s a good thing that you’ll want to suggest as an immediate enhancement to the main site. (“Immediate” being “whenever I get around to it”, that is …)
I never published the website in any public fashion. I did give the address to the people to test; I assume they kept it to themselves.
I should update my robots.txt file.
I’ve throught about setting up a re-direction of some sort, but I’m not sure it would be worth my trouble.