I usually develope what I am doing in private in a non public directory. I had an unlinked directory on a site that I own developing the Imagegenie.net site. The site is now live under its own domain name. Last night I made the rounds of the the major search engines to see if anyone had found it yet. I was very surprised to find that Alexa had it listed but had the test site url. How they found it in less than a month is beyond me. How the heck did they find it is my first question? My son and myself are the only two people who ever visted the site via direct access. I did email him the links. We also tested the IPN script using PayPal. Other than a direct requests for the page and those two items the url was never out there. I did hit the site a bunch of times during a few day period. Is there some "site request" list somewhere that I might have made it onto? The second question is what is the best way to redirect all requests for the mysite/testsite to the now public real site so as not to lose any traffic. There are only about 15 possible pages that could have been ixdexed by anyone. I can do cpanel redirects. At least I think I can. The two sites are on different servers. I would like to take the test site down and use the space for something else. TIA
You probably have the alexa toolbar installed - and they use that data to get their rankings so they keep track of urls visited. You can do a 301 redirect to get any traffic to the new site. Being on two different servers makes no difference.