I am about to launch a new site made in webflow. Webflow is purely used as the front end (e.g. creating account/login etc) and we have a separate domain for the app itself.
for example…
www.mywebsite.com
Because this is a complex SaaS product, we also have a development subdomain that is used internally for testing.
dev.mywebsite.com
We also publish the webflow website to the dev site so we can test changes and log into our development environment.
My question…
Will this cause any issues with regard to SEO as I will essentially have two pages with the same content, one at www and one at dev?
Thanks for your response. It looks like there are two ways. One is using a meta tag, I assume it is not possible to have meta tags that differ depending on where I am publishing on webflow?
If I do it in the HTTP response header I assume that’s nothing to do with webflow (e.g. ill have to get that set externally)
Both Google and Bing run page JS when they crawl. You can dynamically insert meta robots tags and tests show it is respected by Google. I have not personally tested Bing in this scenario. Something you could research.
Here is the result testing that went back to 2015.
thanks for your feedback, I’m not sure I like the dynamic insertion of meta robot tags, seems like there’s room for it going wrong and doesn’t appear (at least on a quick search) to be widely promoted as a method to do this.
Does putting in a HTTP response header have any implications with webflow, i.e. since we are publishing using webflow does it need to be done elsewhere/get “undone” by the publish?
Edit: - I just found in the settings the Global Canonical Tag URL. I assume if I put https://www.mywebsite.com in there it should sort this out for me?
If you don’t want a subdomain indexed use the meta tag. If you are fine with it being indexed and just want to tell Google which URL is canonical then using the Global Canonical Tag is the appropriate option.
