Google, do not index YET

Question

In the effort of building a live site on its actual live hosting platform is there a way to tell google to not YET index the website? I found the following:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

But would that tell them to never come back or would they simply see the noindex tag and then not list the results, then when it comes back to crawl again later and my site is good to go I would have the noindex removed and the site would then start getting indexed?

Answer 1

Sounds like you want to use a robots.txt file instead:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449&topic=2370588&ctx=topic

Update your robots.txt file when you want your content to be indexed.

Answer 2

You can use the robot.txt method.

You can specify which subpage could be spidered. And google comes back, checking the file before indexing. So you can delete the file later in order to get fully indexed.

More Information

• About /robots.txt
• Robots.txt File Generator

Answer 3

You can always change it. The way Google and other robots find your page is if it is linked to on another page. As long as it isn't linked to on another page, it won't be found. Also, once your site is up, chances are that it will be far back in the list of sites.