Dear techies,
I needed an IT consult. One of the 3rd party who had access to a staging website made a mistake and got a staging indexed back in 2015 (yes right lol) and never informed me about the error. We kept using the staging.
That meant 50 products +everything important such as categories + good keywords got indexed and were showing up in search results as recently as December 2021 unknown to us.
Last week, we launched production and I was shocked that google indexed only homepage + 1 product url. I think google thought we were putting already indexed content which were ranking and decided to ignore production. So, not even the product category got indexed which is very bad. (2 valid and 97 crawled but not indexed).
Understanding what happened, I added the staging to search console and did a removal request which was honoured. Then I did a 401.
Now to make the production indexed properly what are my best options?
1. Add 30 new products with good seo and hope google indexes the category + new products. I plan to link the only indexed product with the new ones to aid the crawl.
2. Option 2 is to 301 the staging to production but I am not sure if the staging had weak seo which might carry over? It was actually ranking so I am not saying it was bs seo . But I am afraid of passing on the unknown negative to new production site.
3. Option 3 is to delete all old products and add only the new 30 products (follow option 1 after deleting old urls which google ignored).
Does anyone have any other idea and can someone please validate which of the 3 options for me is the right way to go.
People hiding mistakes are really hurtful when it bites back so late.
Thanks a lot in advance and all ideas are welcome.
Best Regards,
HellFire
