block my site from search engines til it's done

[sely]

how can i go ahead and put my page titles and descriptions in place without worrying about search engines finding an unfinished site? how can i hide it?

[felgall]

The search engines wont find your site until either someone links to it or you tell them that it is there.

[sely]

unfortunately that's not true. i found it myself.

[sely]

search engines found my site soley based upon titles and descriptions....as no content is there yet.

[rhsunderground]

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive">

[sely]

so .... the nullifies any other meta information?

[rhsunderground]

most search engine bots will see that and just go to a different page until they find one that doesn't have that.

[sely]

ok thanks.

[poiuy]

Just my thought but why not put a coming soon index page. Getting listed without any effort on your part should be considered a blessing. Why would you want to risk losing your ranking?

I read somewhere that some search engines i.e. Alexa will spool a site for indexing once you search for a page through their engine that doesn't exist in their directory. If true it's possible that just by searching for your site is how you ended up getting listed their.

[mdoigny]

Instead of mofifying all pages to include a meta tag NOINDEX, use a robots.txt file in the root directory
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

[LeeU]

how can i hide it?

For all intents and purposes you can't hide anything on the Net. Many robots will obey the robots.txt files, others will not; many will obey the meta tags, others will not. It's not the end of the world if they index you. It's a continual process. They will be back. That's what robots do ... they prowl the Web. Just know that the only way to make sure something is not seen is to not put it on the Web.

Just my two cents ...

[felgall]

If there were no links from anywhere to your site then the robots will not have found you so you must be linked to from somewhere.