Should a development domain that is indexed better than the real domain be deleted or redirected if I want to re-use it later?

Should a development domain that is indexed better than the real domain be deleted or redirected if I want to re-use it later? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, redirects, to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Should a development domain that is indexed better than the real domain be deleted or redirected if I want to re-use it later?.Problem :

I am a Web Developer and now almost nothing about server management.

I setup a test server for one of our project at mypersonaldomain.com so that I would have a permanent URL to send to my coworkers and clients. The website is hosted on a server I created using DigitalOcean.

Now my clients have sent me their credentials and I've setup the website on their server too, with the domain name realdomain.com pointing at that server.

The problem : Right now if you do a Google Search for "real domain", you find the link to mypersonnaldomain.com since it's publicly accessible and has been accessed many times, it's more popular than the realdomain.com and is ranked before.

What's the best way to solve this issue?

Can I remove the files from my own server and then ask Google ( https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6349986?hl=en ) to remove the search results for the old content?

Or maybe it's best to setup a redirection from the old one to the new one?

There are two things to keep in mind :

• I would like to re-use mypersonaldomain.com in the future, so I don't want it blacklisted or removed completely from the results in any permanent fashion


• I don't want mypersonaldomain.com to redirect to realdomain.com forever, since I might want to use it again for other things

Solution :

You can't endorse a site with a 301 redirect and somehow maintain it's status for use again later. That would lead to a situation in which people would be cloning equity by switching periodically.

Do more off-page SEO on the real domain. Change the content on your personal domain. Eventually Google will catch up and rank the more useful of the two higher.

Take off content from your site, put a holding page and submit in google webmasters tools for re-indexing. Usually it gets updated in 1-3 days

If the issue about seo, google-search, redirects, is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.