Google Indexing Development Site Despite Robots.txt Block
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Hi,
A development site that has been set-up has the following Robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
In an attempt to block Google indexing the site, however this isn't the case and the development site has since been indexed.
Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it?
Thanks!
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Hi so I'm assuming your on IIS (I'm no expert on ISS I think you will need to configure the web.config) and I'm just going to step back now and get my coat as I only have experience with Apache
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Thanks for your help! Much appreciated
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It's generally best to noindex/nofollow using the meta robots tag in the header. If it's not too much of a stretch for you, you can also password protect the test site. The over-so-lovely and charming Googles will still display results blocked by robots.txt - though it won't generally cache the content. If you would like, you can hookup the test site with Webmaster Tools and remove the URL(s) from the index.
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Its my understanding that htaccess is PHP based and as we code in .net we don't have a htaccess file.
Do you know of this this happening before because its not something that I've heard of.
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You would need to block access via htaccess rather than robots file as the robots.txt is only advisory
If you are using wordpress I use this simple plugin JF3 Maintenance Redirect
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