beta site vs. real site

Hey guys,

Couldn't really find anything useful in search, but I just started working on a friend's site that is being developed from scratch. The current dev site is hosted at subdomain beta., and has been indexed by Google. What approach would you take to get rid of this so that the content isn't duplicate when the site goes live at the www domain.

Thanks!

You need to use Robots.txt to make sure Google doesn't crawl and index that content. Look up a quick tutorial on how to properly set up your robots file - you can do it through webmaster tools or just upload it via FTP.
It's only 2 lines ie:

Thanks for the reply, I was pretty sure that was the the way to go and actually had that fix put in this morning. I was wondering more along the lines of what impact this could have on the site if we launch say 3 weeks from now. Will those pages drop from the index once the crawler sees the new robots.txt, or is there something I should do in addition to that?

Thanks!

Justin, While the disallow in the Robot.txt should be quick enough to de-index your content, Google has a tool that can expedite the removal of your content in their index. Here is a step by step that will guide you along the process. This should help you to reduce any duplicate content issues when you want to launch the new site. Regards, Shawn