We recently moved our domain to BigCommerce. Previously, the website was doing well SEO wise, but things unfortunately took a nosedive after about a month. When you sign-up with BigCommerce, they assign you a TEMPORARY URL that mirrors your actual domain (they call it a TEMP URL, even though there is nothing temporary about it). Case in point, we have found that some pages from the TEMPORARY SITE have been indexed, and we suspect our rankings have lowered as a result of duplicate content. Would Google really penalize us for one mirror site? Unfortunately, we have no control over that TEMP URL, according to BigCommerce. When asking them if they can 301 direct it to our domain, or shut it down, they say that is not an option. Blocking the TEMP URL via robots.txt is not an option since the two sites are mirrored. I'm hoping that someone might have an alternative idea on what I can do to get the TEMP URLs removed from Google's index (if that is even possible). Thank you.
Just wondering if you have resolved the issue, or if there have been any improvements in your search rankings? I spoke with BigCommerce recently, and was told that you could block the search engines from crawling and indexing the mirror site via robots.txt. But after reading your post, i don't think i can believe them. Especially as they told me not to worry about the mirror site as the search engines can't find it since they have a lot of demo stores and it's too much info for search engines to process! How ridiculous! I will try to get more answers from them, as i am interested in switching to bigcommerce, but only if the search engines can't see the mirror site.