Google indexed site's address by accident. What do I do now?

Google indexed site's address by accident. What do I do now? - 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, , to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Google indexed site's address by accident. What do I do now?.Problem :

I was making a site for a friend of mine and he wanted to be able to see my progress as I worked on the site, so I decided to put the site on a server on my computer and enable access by a domain name registered to me.

It turns out that I forgot to set up a robots.txt file for the site and somehow Google indexed the site.

My question is: What do I do now?

As I understand it, Google doesn't like duplicate content and my friend could have problems when I upload the new site to his server.

Right now his current site, which only has a work in progress page, is first on Google when searching for relevant keywords and I really really don't want to damage that.

Is there anything else I need to be concerned about?

Solution :

1) Immediately block the site you have up now using robots.txt

2) On the development site use canonical URLs to point to the new site so that site gets credit for the content. They do work cross-domain. This meta tag may also help.

3) after you launch use 301 redirects from the development site to the new site so Google knows those pages have moved to new URLs

Add the robots.txt file to your server then request the pages to be removed from Google's index using Google Webmaster Tools. You should then set up 301 redirects to the new site when it goes live.

In the future, you should set up Basic Authentication in Apache or IIS for test pages. This will not only prevent indexing (even from spiders that don't respect robots.txt) but will also prevent random users from getting to your site and seeing what you don't want to be public yet.

Remove a page or site from Google's search results - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734

If the issue about seo, google-search, , 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.