One of the things I learned a few days ago is that when I tried out the staging post site functionality, some of my posts got indexed by Google!
How do I know this? I discovered this in two different ways. One, A popular post referred to something that I posted on the staging site but not on my real site. Two, in Google Search Console it listed a post and then I realized it was from the staging site.
Not a big deal for me, but it could be a very big deal for a company that was working on secret information that might want to post at a specific time. The easiest way to fix this is to require authentication to view the site. That makes perfect sense and the next time that I do a staging site, it will be the first thing that I do.
Now of course one of the downsides of having staging site content in a SERP result is that I didn’t intend for it to be there. Now I have to manually remove it. No big deal. It was a learning experience. I didn’t think Google would index the staging site when it was up so briefly, but this is just a heads-up to everyone else. It can happen to you.
Do I regret doing the staging site? Not at all. I learned lots of things by doing it. I learned that it can be a helpful process when you are making big changes. I used to make changes live on my site since no one complained about it. However, going forward I won’t do that anymore.
Why did I use a staging site? To fix some of the difficulties that I shared in an earlier post. My search form wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and there were some imperfections with my design. Elementor has been so helpful for me to learn advanced web design/CSS it has been worth the cost just on that basis.
Being able to self-publish is awesome, isn’t it?