Ok, i'm in a development stage of my site, i'll be hosting it on a VPS account. the domain i'll use is an old domain, where it seems it's indexed in google already. Now, that domain will be used for my testing purposes, it will be password protected, so i don't want anyone accessing it for now, not even search engines. how can i do that? is it through robots.txt, or is there any other method? have in mind, that i don't want to be blocked from google or any other search engines. awaiting your guidance.
One of the potential side effects of using robots.txt will be that the URLs will still be indexed, but with a notice: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." Although, you can use the remove URL function in Google Webmaster Tools (unless there are URL parameters involved, then you need to tweak the URL parameters section). Are you going to password protect with htaccess/htpasswd?