Hi all
This may seem as a backward request, but is it possible to hide the website using CS-Cart from the search engine?
In order to develop on a live site without search engines picking up the website.
Regards
There's a few ways as not all search engines comply with each.
Use the Access Key and add the following to robots.txt in the root of your store:
Disallow: /
Remember to remove this line from your robots.txt when you go live. You could also add a meta noindex tag to /skins/your_skin/customer/meta.tpl but any rogue search engine which doesn't comply with robots.txt will index your site regardless. Access Key should prevent these from crawling your site. Access keys alone should do it, but the robots.txt will make sure the big guns definitely do not.
StellarBytes
Thank you for the well explained answer. Most appreciated.
I think this will go better into robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /
I hope that helps,
—
Valentin
Close your store and use the access key.