Will I incur a duplicate content penalty?

[seoda]

I am developing a wordpress site and I had the work in progress in a sub-directory a la http://example.com/devsite (example.com has had a separate simple Plesk blog page cum holding page with contact details).

I had unwittingly left example.com/devsite visible to search engines and some of the content has been indexed already. My question is, when I finish the development (including creating new SEO-friendly urls) and move this site to example.com, will I incur a duplicate content penalty with Google?

Or if as when .../devsite is deleted, will Google treat the example.com domain content as sufficiently original (given it is on the same domain and I will be submitting it to sitemaps etc.)?

Any advice appreciated.

 

[MOH]

Since your real site is presumably going to end up being more authoritative than the work in progress one, and you'll be focusing your SEO efforts on it, that's the one that's going to get returned by Google.

But if you're worried about it, submit a URL removal request to Google - register your site with webmaster tools, then under Site Configuration > Crawler Access, Remove URL tab.

Make sure you've excluded the devsite folder first using robots.txt or noindex

 

[seoda]

Thanks MOH, that's useful.

 

[biz4tech]

Google will not find content when crawl next time on old pages because you have removed already and your site will be count as good content next crawl.