I have redesigned my entire site. I need to check if certain features work. If I were to upload it to another domain for a few days, just to check the new features, might it have a negative impact on my domain? Much of the content is exactly the same.
A few days is fine but you are correct in worrying about that. You never know if Google is going to pick up the content overnight. Or perhaps you do. Only you know what is going on regarding the other machine. I have this exact problem with an SEO client on DP right now. He knows enough about what is going on to be dangerous lol... At any rate, if you are using a script for instance, or something written in php, you can simply make an index.html file with anything in it to hide the site. Make sense? I am happy to help. I can host this on a junk box if you want for a few days. Actually, given my experience this evening with said moron, it would do me some good to do something nice for somebody. Hope I don't sound too much like a hippie. Nigel
Alternatively you could just make use of robot.txt to blog the new website from search engine spiders till you have completed the testing. Just to be on the safer side
If you could explain that, I would very much appreciate it. All of my new pages are in PHP, and most of the content is called from a database. How would I hide the site with an index.html file? I don't exactly understand what you mean by that. What's a junk box? Whatever the case, I appreciate, but must decline, your offer. Thank you for the help. I have added reputation points to your account.
The above posters comment is safe and a good collateral thought process from mine. My point is as follows. Web servers read index.html before they read the .php extension... even if its index.php. Hence, you can simply name a blank notepad doc index.html and upload it to your root folder. When you visit the site, you will see a blank page. When you visit the site and add /index.php to it you will see what you are working on. Hence, if you are running a script like vbulletin or joomla, you can simply add an index.html file without a link to internal pages. Its only a few days, its not that big of a deal. If you use Kneoteric_eSolutions idea, you can use the robots.txt file to outright block those folders on the directory. Great call on his part. Takes 30 seconds longer to implement but it is rock solid. hope that helps, Nigel
The way out suggeted by Nigel is workable but I have my apprehensions about it. Most search engine spiders retrieve a page to crawl and index it and if the file lies independently on the server without any web pages linking to it; spiders may not be able to index it. However I have heard (I cannot confirm a 100%) that some spiders (Yahoo) retrieve pages from the server end and if such is the case your unlinked pages could get indexed and create issues. Blocking the entire thing by using robot.txt will therefore be my call in a similar situation. Not all search engine crawlers follow robot.txt but the major 3 (Google, Yahoo, MSN) do.
Use robots.txt with */disallow to block ALL spiders crawling the site. But I don't understand why you think there is a problem. If you upload the site to any location NO search engine will know about it and therefore none will visit, unless it's to the root of a domain that was previously in use. The simple solution is to upload it to a subdirectory on any domain and have no inbound links to it. It won't get crawled.