Test site showing up in google

Placebo

And the client is not happy and its still WIP.
So anyway i can stop this?

can a php password type script prohibit access to anypage of a site?

thanks

aidan_walsh

You could password protect it with htaccess, or block it being spidered in your robots.txt.

Since Google already have it I'm not sure how easy they will let it go.

marcphisto

If it's urgent look here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=61062&hl=en

You'll need to set a robots.txt file at the root of the test site folder disallowing all robots access and you can set the meta robots tag to noindex, nofollow on each page of the site also.

Experience has taught me that password protecting the site using .htaccess or other methods doesn't stop google from getting in.

hope that helps.

aidan_walsh

Thats cool, I wasn't aware Google had that.

The Corinthian

aidan_walsh wrote: »

Thats cool, I wasn't aware Google had that.

I think you'll find that robots.txt pre-dates Google:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

aidan_walsh

The Corinthian wrote: »

I think you'll find that robots.txt pre-dates Google:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

Robots yes, the Emergency Removal form, no

mambo

marcphisto wrote: »

Experience has taught me that password protecting the site using .htaccess or other methods doesn't stop google from getting in.

You can't have been doing it right then! ;-)

The Corinthian

aidan_walsh wrote: »

Robots yes, the Emergency Removal form, no

I stand corrected

colm_c

marcphisto wrote: »

Experience has taught me that password protecting the site using .htaccess or other methods doesn't stop google from getting in.

There shouldn't be any problems with this method if done correctly.

forbairt

normally simplest solution is to bang a .htaccess / .htpassd onto the system

(assuming apache / similar of course)

robots.txt should mean you don't get indexed but ... meh! ... why chance it.

most panels let you password protect a directory / subdirectory and so on ...

corkie

Placebo wrote: »

And the client is not happy and its still WIP.
So anyway i can stop this?

can a php password type script prohibit access to anypage of a site?

thanks

Are you using wordpress or another php application on the site. Because the same happened to my own test site.

Wordpress has a privacy feature that you can enable so that your site doesn't get indexed by the search engine. As I hadn't submitted my site, to google etc. I was wondering how I got a high ranking for it. It wasn't till I used this feature. That my site fell of the front page of google.

Regards,
John

Bluefrog

forbairt wrote: »

robots.txt should mean you don't get indexed but ... meh! ... why chance it.
...

Are you seriously suggesting that Google doesn't respect robots.txt??? Can you imagine the backlash if this were actually the case?

colm_c

Bluefrog wrote: »

Are you seriously suggesting that Google doesn't respect robots.txt??? Can you imagine the backlash if this were actually the case?

Google do respect robots.txt but there are some crawlers who don't and feed some of the less popular search engines, still resulting in your pages being indexed and available when they shouldn't be.

Bluefrog

True but Google won't. If you don't want your content available to the public then password protecting the site as described above is appropriate.

I just didn't want readers left with the impression that Google sometimes ignores the robots file.