My Staging Server has Been Indexed in Google for my ASP.NET Website – Help!

We had this problem recently with a client who linked to their staging server before the site was live. Because the staging server had a separate IP from the live site, the staging server got indexed in Google instead of the domain.

The solution is to use a 301 redirect to make sure all requests for the staging server are permanently redirected on the HTTP request level. This is quite simple to do on the Apache webserver – you can simply add a redirect handle to your .htaccess file. However, if you’re on shared ASP .Net hosting (a.k.a. IIS) and you don’t have access to the IIS control panel this quickly becomes a pain. The solution is to check the referring domain on server event startup (i.e. before a session is initialised) using a global.asax operation. Here is a small C# script to add to your global.asax file which will allow you to perform this task.

if (Request.ServerVariables[“SERVER_NAME”].Contains(“Staging_Server_Name”))
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”, “Domain_Name”");
}

All new requests for your staging server will now be redirected to your domain. You might also like to submit a sitemap and “resubmission” request via the Google webmaster console.