I have a website with several thousand pages and I generate a small version of it (100 pages) which I upload to a temporary testing.mywebsite.com URL for testing purposes.Yet, it could be seen as duplicate content considering the live website on a different URL. Should I be worried about this? Can I get a penalty for this? I was considering setting canonical links to the main website or setting no index on the pages generated for testing. Is it necessary to do so? Would it help?
Are testing website URLs considered duplicate content and do they trigger penalties?
duplicate content;canonical url;testing;noindex;penalty
Search engines might  find your testing website.  index pages from your testing website. decide that a page from the real site and the testing site are duplicate copies, so they might only index one of those pages.If you are unlucky, they might decide to index the testing page instead of the real page in some cases (especially, if not all of your real pages are indexed yet).I was considering setting canonical links to the main website or setting no index on the pages generated for testing. Is it necessary to do so? Would it help?Yes, it would help (for those search engines that support canonical resp. robots-noindex).