: Does hosting the pre-release website on domain affect SEO? Until now and still going strong I've always hosted my pre-release websites (my own and customers) (test builds / beta versions) on

Until now and still going strong I've always hosted my pre-release websites (my own and customers) (test builds / beta versions) on a test domain, before uploading the whole content to the official domain, purely based upon the assumption that, even with a <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow"> it would affect your future/current SEO score on the official release of the website.

But I was wondering: Is that actually true?

Of course, without a no-follow, Google (and others) would index all unofficial and, often not completed, content, combined with a (often) worse coded website than the official release, resulting with a lower SEO score.

However, -with- using a <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow"> your SEO score (might?) not be lower, but for a longer time not indexed.

I'm known quite a bit with SEO, but always wondered if this assumption was true.

My question: Is this assumption true and what could be my best bet of having the website online for testing/showing opportunities, besides just testing locally.

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@BetL925

I wouldn't worry too much about letting Googlebot view websites that are works in progress:

It is very common to have "coming soon" pages. Googlebot knows about them and knows what to do about them.
Google expects websites to be released gradually -- releasing lots of pages all at once could be a sign of spam to Google

On the other hand, Google uses usability signals as part of their algorithm. If the site is in such bad shape that users don't like it, I wouldn't put it up yet. Users returning back to the search results to click on another site is a sure way to lose rankings.

I typically release a website as soon as it has a few pages of content that users might find useful. I use a development server that is not publicly accessible before the release date.

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: Does hosting the pre-release website on domain affect SEO? Until now and still going strong I've always hosted my pre-release websites (my own and customers) (test builds / beta versions) on

More posts by @Nimeshi995

: Htaccess redirect to public folder caught in authentication I have an .htaccess file at the root of my server which has auth on it. I have a redirect statement that upon entering example.myserver.com

: 301 redirected an entire website 4.5 months ago; still showing up in Google search results? Consolidated two websites on December 9, 2013; a site wide page-to-page 301 redirect was implemented

: Using Google Analytics to determine whether paid media visitors subsequently return I'd like to be able to find out whether I am driving returning visits to my site through paid media. E.g.

: How do popups affect the bounce rate? Suppose a user lands on a particular page on your website from search results and, immediately after landing, is shown a link which opens a modal dialog

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