How do I know if my staging site has been indexed?

Since we launched Indexping one of the questions we get asked most is:

A staging, or pre-production environment is a close replica of the live (production) environment used for testing. Unfortunately these environments are quite often left accessible to search engines, which means they can be included in their index.

When a staging environment is included in a search engines index there can be many consequences which are damaging to the business, primarily; reduction in search visibility and inadvertent access by unintended users.

Google provides a simple way to see if your staging site has been indexed, using the site command.

Within the search box enter the site command, followed by the domain you wish to see indexed pages for. Google will then return the number of indexed pages for the specified domain:

To see if your staging site has been indexed simply enter your staging domain after the site command, for example:

Naturally, seeing no results is the ideal scenario. However, there is no guarantee that Google will not index your staging site in the future without putting preventative measures in place, and ensuring that they remain in place.

And this is a common problem; staging is updated (for legitimate reasons), and the preventative measures are lost. The staging site is indexed, and nobody is aware until it causes an issue.

Indexping automates the process for you, and checks for indexation on a daily basis, alerting you if it discovers indexed pages so you can take remedial action to have the pages removed.

For a business, this might be monitoring one or two pre-production environments, for an agency this might be monitoring hundreds of environments. And the time saved using Indexping, alongside the confidence that it is actually being checked makes it a worthwhile investment.

✅ Automated daily indexation check

✅ Scalable solution that can scan hundreds of environments

✅ Weekly indexation digest

✅ Confidence staging environments are not being indexed