Burlington Web Designers Be Careful of How You Name Temp. Folders
This article can easily be classified under the SEO Services 101 category or the Web Design 101. Why? Because it has to do with both topics but today it’s mainly going to be about SEO.
Not many people know that search engines can crawl your development folders. Development folders are the folders some of us use some of the time to work and test in when we’re developing or working on a site. We all know it’s safer to work off-size but as web designers or SEOs we all run into those times when it’s so much easier to just work in a temppoary folder online.
With that said a light-bulb must have already gone on in your head. Exactly. Let’s say if Google can crawl your temp. folders what could that do to your current or future rankings?
At this time I would say not much but there is one scenario that would really tick any SEO or online-market off. That would be the scenario where your rankings are actually increased due to the newly found pages – especially if they’re full of new and related content. If you had links in the pages in your development/temporary folder to live pages those could be considered good links and do good for your rankings. Once they’re gone, after development and you go live your rankings could be reduced again. That wouldn’t be the most optimal result to deal with.
This is only one example of a possible scenario that could very well play out if you don’t take the proper precaution.
The precaution
The best way to handle this is if you’re bent on working in a live folder, rename that folder every few days. Even if Google does reach your folder within that time-span and caches some of your content, the result wouldn’t be significant enough to affect your rankings at all – especially if you rename the folder and it isn’t there the next time they visit for a deeper crawl.
Rename your development folders every so often and you’ll be fine. One easy way of doing this is by using numbers as the folder names.
