There’s no room for mistakes. Period.

And yet, I see these type of mistakes almost on a daily basis. Some are due to technology while others are simply human error. My response is simple. First, technology should never stand in the way or negatively impact business operations or messaging. Second, more than one person should always review or have some insight into the project and human errors should be fixed prior to being exposed to the public.

In this case, the error I am referring to is allowing your test page or development site to be indexed by the search engines and made available to the public in their results. I’ve tried to illustrate this with the screen capture below from Google. Let me explain what is in it and how I found it.

I was trying to track down an ex-colleague that I knew ran a freelance web development business. So, I hit Google and searched for his business name. The first two results were for his home page and his bio page on his website. The third result, however, was obviously a test page he had developed for one of his clients. There it was, sitting fat and pretty in the #3 spot on the first page of results for his business name. (Click to enlarge thumbnail. All identifiable information has been blurred out.)

Imagine if you were given this designer’s name as a referral and you popped online to find his site. What would you think about seeing his in-development project right there, live to the world? I would wonder if he would expose my project with the same carelessness and lack of regard.

That led me to do a search on the client’s name and product name. Again, the first two results showed the client’s website and the #3 spot had the web designer’s test page sitting there. Now indexing and ranking can happen overnight, but it is extremely rare for a page that is online for a very short time to show up in the top ten results. This had to of been there a while. I’ve checked it 3 times since the last week of April, with the last one being on May 30th. All 3 times I have received the same results. So not only has it been allowed to be indexed, but it has stayed there.

There are several ways to prevent this basic mistake that with a little more quality control on the part of the designer would make sure this kind of thing would never happen. At the very least it can be blocked with a robots meta tag that includes noindex. A second way would be to lock out the search engine robots with a robots.txt file. Third, you could put it behind a secure login via htpasswd. If you’re a developer reading this and you don’t know what any of those things mean, you can start by googling those terms.

Again, the bottom line is that stpuid web design mistakes like this should never, ever happen.