Question

I am building a website and heard that if the website gets listed on search engines, it might get bad reputation and its very difficult to lift it up on the rank of those search engines.

I would like to know, how could I make my website not to be listed on search engines until I finish it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Most obvious: don’t link it anywhere.

Second most obvious: put in authentication requirement (basic, digest)

Also: http://www.robotstxt.org/, specifically http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/prevent.html

As they say, note that robots.txt is only a suggestion. Google will heed it, but spambots will not.