Dissallow robots for a while

Question

I'm will be hosting a wordpress site on a live server. But it will be in test phase for while. How can I tell the robots not to index the site till then?

Answer 1

Stick a "disallow everything" robots.txt file in (with a relatively short expires header) and edit it when you are ready for indexing.

Answer 2

Use robots.txt to disallow, then allow whenever your site goes live.

Answer 3

If you are using WordPress 3.x, you can go on the admin page to the Settings menu, then click Privacy. There is an option there to block robots.

Answer 4

Disable your RSS feed, too, as Google uses RSS for indexing. Use WordPress › Absolute Privacy « WordPress Plugins or use in functions.php:

function fb_disable_feed() {
    wp_die( __() );
}

add_action('do_feed', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);