Search crawl host header site collection

Question

I have two env production and testing.

In production env we have a web application called htp://contoso/.which has entry in DNS for contoso.

Now we are creating the same in testing environment htp://contoso. for which we are adding the host entry in Host file in the same server to browse.

Now is it possible to crawl the data only in testing env (without crawling production env )when we configure the search in testing env.(I am aware that this is not correct SP setup,but we wanted to test this )

Also i have a host header site collection, is it possible to crawl that site collection alone without crawling the whole webapplication?

Answer 1

Yes. You should be able to accomplish this using Crawl Rules.

1. Go to your Search Service Application
2. Crawl Rules
3. Add a Crawl Rule
4. Add the rule to exclude URLs that you do not want to crawl.
5. Once added, the next time the crawl will run on that web application, the crawl will look at the rules that you have provided and exclude the URLs.