Test website query

silvine

I want to set up a domain for testing a website but I don't want the site to be available/indexed by search engines engines. I am using a hosting provider with cpanel.

What's the best way to do this?

I know you can do local installs but I want to get to grips with cpanel and some other tools.

oeb

silvine wrote: »

I want to set up a domain for testing a website but I don't want the site to be available/indexed by search engines engines. I am using a hosting provider with cpanel.

What's the best way to do this?

I know you can do local installs but I want to get to grips with cpanel and some other tools.

There are two ways of doing this, the you can create a robots.txt file there with noindex, but there is no guarentee that search engines will honour it (The big ones normally do though).

What I normally do for my dev servers is just password protect the entire directory (There should be an option to password protect within cpanel, perhalps within the file manager, or assuming is running on apache, you can use a generator like the one here - http://www.htpasswdgenerator.net/ )

silvine

Thanks, I'll look for the password option. Am I correct in saying this will cover the sub domains I set up too?

oeb

silvine wrote: »

Thanks, I'll look for the password option. Am I correct in saying this will cover the sub domains I set up too?

Not always, you might need to set it up individually for each one. It depends on how apache is configured there.