Unindex the entire test site

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Amanda Polewski: Hi - kind of a long question. We’re redesigning our website through an external vendor. External vendor has created a test site on WordPress subdomain under their own main domain.
  
  Our plan: Migrate the test site over to our current live domain and implement our redirect plan.
  
  Problem: External vendor has not added “noindex” “nofollow” to the tags and Google has indexed the site.  ;
  
  What’s the best way forward from here in terms of SEO? I had thought I could unindex the entire test site before we make it live but that doesn’t look like a possibility anymore?
• 
  Jefe Birkner: So, the test site has been indexed? And the concern is that it will rank, rather than the main site?
  Is the test site going to come down, once the real site launches? My suspicion is that this is a short term issue which will be resolved when the "real" site has inbound links and is associated with social profiles, and GMB pages, etc...
• 
  Edwin Jonk: I would noindex the whole sub-domain. It is rather easy, because you can hard code it in the header template. ;
  
  To speed up, I would try to re-submit the sitemap in Google's search console.
  
  P.S. do not forget to remove the noindex once you migrate it over.
• 
  Dave Elliott: I'd get them to add the noindex and no follow tags. Block your site in robots.txt and then remove the entire subdomain from the google index using GWT 'remove urls'.
  
  I'd then slap your devs for being sloppy.
  
  Just make sure you take off all the no index and no follow tags as you go live!
  
  http://searchengineland.com/removing-urls-from-the-index-in-bulk-159646 is a pretty good guide.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: +Dave Elliott ;I wouldn't block the site in robots.txt, because G already indexed the site. I do assume that there are no links pointing to the dev site. ;
  
  So it is rather easy. Use the noindex tag. To me, it is sloppy but not the end of the world.
• 
  Amanda Polewski: Thanks for the advice all! Since the test site is a subdomain on the developer's main domain, we don't control GWT which complicates things. However the subdomain they've built the test on should come down once we get the code - but I'll check with them to make sure in case that's not a given. Hopefully that's the easy answer! ;