If I buy a hosting (+ domain) service for the website of a friend of mine, and then I decide to use the remaining web space and mysql databases for my development and test...
is google caching my development websites (in other folders and sub-urls) under his website ?
What's the downside to develop on a server with already a production website.. ? I was thinking to create a tiny url linking to a www.myfriendwebsite.com/mydevelopmentSite.. in order to hide the real url.
Thanks
Your hosting provider may have forbidden that in his Terms of Service (mine has). Other than that, I'd go for a subdomain instead of a subdirectory (like mydevelopmentsite.myfriendswebsite.com).
If you don't link to it or don't submit to google or list in a sitemap -- google won't find it.
But, you could also just use a robots.txt to tell google not to index it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
Update: to stop google and malicious bots:
Put a directory in robots.txt using *, and then put your site in a hard to guess subdirectory of that directory -- also, don't keep directory browsing on.
Also -- don't link to it anywhere, but perhaps you can't stop others from linking -- in that case, only robots.txt will keep you out of google. Malicious bots can get the site from the link.