Hosting WIP sites bad for SEO?

[dedwardp]

Hi all,

Over the past month or so I've taken more of an active interest in the SEO of my site and trying to climb the rankings of Google and so on. I appreciate it is a long term project and something that doesn't happen overnight, but I think I've been making some important steps nevertheless.

One thing that I have been wondering about is whether hosting work in progress web designs for clients is damaging to my own site's rankings? For example, just recently I had been developing a website for a local skip hire company and was hosting it at /skip on my website's server for them to track the progress of its' development etc.

As the content of all of these pages would have been completely irrelevant to the design service I offer, would this have affected my site's quality towards the design keywords and so on that I'm looking to optimise towards?

Thanks,

[Leo-InstallingIT]

If there were no links to the content the search engines probably wouldn't have picked it up.

It's probably worth putting a robots file specifying no index on development sites to ensure they are not indexed in the future.

Many Thanks

Leo

[dedwardp]

If there were no links to the content the search engines probably wouldn't have picked it up.

It's probably worth putting a robots file specifying no index on development sites to ensure they are not indexed in the future.

Many Thanks

Leo

Thanks Leo, the point re: the robots file makes perfect sense and is one that I guess should have jumped out at me after the reading up on SEO I've been doing recently! :redface:

Thanks a lot though, I'll definitely bear this in mind for any future work.