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What's going on?Why dev URLs can show up in searchWhy it's not a problemWant to speed up the cleanup?What we're doing to prevent this
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Why You Might See Dev URLs Indexed (and Why It’s Nothing to Worry About)

Edited

What's going on?

If you've launched a site on our platform and later noticed that some .bwpsites.com URLs are appearing in search results, it’s understandable to be concerned. But rest assured, this doesn’t pose any SEO risk, and here’s why.

Why dev URLs can show up in search

During development, your site may be temporarily accessible on a .bwpsites.com subdomain (our development environment). In some rare cases, search engines can crawl and index these URLs before the site goes live and redirects are fully in place.

This can happen if:

  • The site was briefly accessible without password protection or noindex headers

  • External links or sitemap entries (even temporarily) exposed the .bwpsite.com URL

  • Googlebot visited the dev site before the final domain was launched

Why it's not a problem

All dev environments on our platform are automatically configured to redirect to your live site using a 301 (permanent) redirect as soon as the site is launched.

This means:

  • All SEO value is passed to the live site; Google respects 301 redirects.

  • There is no risk of duplicate content or penalties.

  • These .bwpsite.com links in Google’s index will eventually drop off as search engines update their results.

In short, it looks like this to Google:

http://yoursite.bwpsites.com → (301 redirect) → https://yourdomain.com/about

Google sees that the real home for the content is your live domain and attributes all the credit there.

Want to speed up the cleanup?

If you’d prefer not to wait for search engines to naturally phase out the old URLs, you can use the Google Search Console Removals Tool to hide them sooner. This is entirely optional and only for peace of mind.

What we're doing to prevent this

We’ve built in multiple layers of protection for our dev environments, including:

  • HTTP headers on our development sites that tell search engines not to index the development domains

  • 301 redirects from all .bwpsite.com URLs to the live domain after launch

  • Optional password protection and index blocking during development

Feel free to reach out to our support in case of any questions.

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