How to prevent toxic backlinks from site preview deployments?

We use Netlify’s site preview deployments when reviewing proposed changes in a pull request. These site preview deployments stay round and create toxic backlinks to our production site, hurting its SEO. How do we avoid such backlinking?

hi there leecalcote. i am not a super expert on deploy previews, but to my knowledge deploy previews do contain “noindex. nofollow” tags to prevent them from being indexed by search engines.

Can you share a little bit more about where you are seeing/how you know your SEO is being affected? that would help us understand if there is a bug or similar.

also a site name (or API ID, is safe to share) could be helpful. thanks!

Hi Perry, we have the same issue but all our deploy previews and branch deploys actually contain an ‘index,follow’ meta tag. This is not replaced by ‘noindex,nofollow’, like you described. Not sure what we’re doing wrong. Is there a setting in Netlify to enable this?

Hey Paul,

What’s the name/url of your site so we can look further into this?