How to make development site Noindex Nofollow, but production without

Question

I have a joomla 3.3 development site and a production site. I'm doing all development in the development site and every time that the development get pushed to production, I need to make sure I change noindex,nofollow to index, follow.

Anyway I can keep development noindex,nofollow without changing production?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 18 '14 at 15:28

2

There is an easier method than using noindex, nofollow. Use canonical links on your pages, using the production url. Like this, even if search engines find about your development pages, they won't index them.

answered Sep 18 '14 at 15:28

Jérôme Verstrynge

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You mean to put to the development site? So by using this, I wont need the noindex,nofollow meta? Will this mess up all my relative links when I browse the development site? – user3108698 Sep 18 '14 at 17:25
No, it won't mess up with your relative links. The canonical link is an instruction (or more precisely, a strong hint) for search engines. It has nothing to do with navigation. – Jérôme Verstrynge Sep 18 '14 at 17:37
Don't forget to include the page on top of the domain name like this: In other words, each canonical link will be different for each page. – Jérôme Verstrynge Sep 18 '14 at 17:43
How do I do that without hacking any joomla php file? – user3108698 Sep 18 '14 at 20:56
I don't know, because I am no joomla specialist. I think you should ask another question. – Jérôme Verstrynge Sep 19 '14 at 06:06

user3108698 · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-06T02:07:23.317

2

Use a conditional php code inside the template head php file.

<?php
//if host is development show noindex
 $host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']; 
 if($host == "development.com")
 {
     echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, nofollow\">";
 }
?>

edited Nov 06 '14 at 02:07

answered Nov 06 '14 at 01:52

user3108698

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emmanuel · Answer 3 · 2014-09-18T07:50:41.417

1

When you move the files to the production server you don't have to copy configuration.php that store the variable for robots in public $robots = '';.

I highly recommend you to keep your development installation htaccess password protected to be sure that would never be accessed by search engines.

Hope this helps

edited Sep 18 '14 at 07:50

answered Sep 18 '14 at 05:43

emmanuel

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How to make development site Noindex Nofollow, but production without

3 Answers3