Topic: How can i stop google putting my site in the search engine??

Hi alll...

I have a domain that i use for testing sites... there is no site setup at the domain. mydomain.com.

when i test sites i create a subdomain for them so i can get to them easily. so site1.mydomain.com etc etc..

Now somehow google is finding these sites and putting them in the search engine!!! but i dont want them too... I only want them to put the proper location up when the size goes live.

For starters how is google even finding the pages? I have not submitted it to any search engines, and there are no links anywhere else pointing to these test sites , so how can google find it without any reference?

Secondly how can i stop it, i want to be able to have sites there and being ignored by google....

Thanks all..

I believe you can put <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> between your head tags and that'll keep almost all spiders from indexing your website.

Then you can go to http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller and remove each URL from the listings.

It could be finding the pages because you have gone to them with the Google Toolbar installed--I believe that this can happen, correct me if I'm wrong.

-- http://www.google.com/remove.html#exclude_pages

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Oh.. i do use the google toolbar, i didnt know it did that. It must monitor everywhere u go then?

I'm not positive, but I believe it does.

However it's not really personal data that it stores, just the URL of websites. Because it tries to find information like PR on every website you see. (This is assuming you have the advanced features turned on)

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The easiest way, if you have the ability to do it, is to create a robots.txt file in your server root with the following content

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

This means that robots are forbidden to fetch anything from this domain.

Yeh i have looked that stuff up, i was mainly wondering how they were finding the site.

Actually with that robot file, does that have to go in the root of each subdomain? Im not sure how search engines treat subdomains since they are normally just directories stored in the main domain..

I would probably include it in each subdomain, just as an extra precaution.

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Each and every subdomain needs it's own robots.txt. All the spiders do is ask for
$currentDomain/robots.txt - how should it find the 'main' subdomain? And subdomains once were meant to actually point to different machines - that they point to different subdirectories is more or less an 'accident' of modern day webhosting.

so long,

->Tyberius Prime

Yeh i thought that might be the case... thanks everyone!