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?
Google could learn about it
Learn from what exactly?