: Hide from google while developing I will be building a (wordpress) web site. While I am developing, other team members will be pushing content. I'd like to have it hidden from google while

@LarsenBagley505

Here is what I do: I put the developmental site in a new subdomain, possibly with a non-obvious name, e.g.,

development-orange.example.com

Then I don't link to it at all on any public site, and give the URL only to my team-members -- requesting, "don't share the URL".

I think search engines have no way to find new subdomains without a finding a link on a public site. I think subdomains are resolved at the hosting service, and HS's don't seem to publish names of subdomains defined by their customers. This may not be exactly correct, but the method seems to work for me. To check, I occasionally search for unique text on the home page of such a site. Haven't had a hit yet.

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@Shelley277

Just go to settings in Wordpress site you can activate robot txt there to stop all indexing of your Wordpress site you don't need any plugins

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@Lee4591628

You can use a robots.txt in the root of your domain, with the following code:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /


or if you want to block all search engines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /


Alternatively, if you want to block access to everyone but yourself, or select people, you can use the following in your .htaccess, once again in the root of the domain:

order deny, allow
deny from all
allow from 123.45.67.89


Where 123.45.67.89 is your IP address

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@Kimberly868

You could also use the robots.txt file, with:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /


Google and other big search engines will follow the rule but it doesn't prevent from seeing them.

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@Annie201

If you are building a WordPress website you should use the maintenance plugin and check off "Apply HTTP header '503 Service Unavailable' and 'Retry-After ' to Maintenance Mode splash page"

This tells Google and others that your website isn't down or having trouble and to come back later.

Password protecting the folder is fine. If you do that you should put up a static HTML page with some content to at least give Google and others some content to crawl and begin indexing your site, the sooner the better right?

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