Thread

I need to make an upgrade to my site which involves some url changes and some work i can only do whilst the site is live (don’t ask me why!) so i want to temporarily stop google and chums from indexing my site until i’ve finished the work and added my redirects.

What i want to know is, if i put a “disallow all” in the robots.txt and a search engine comes along and sees that, will it (a) respect my robots.txt and (b) come back another time? I don’t want em thinking they must never crawl my site again, that would be a disaster of biblical proportions!

Any advice very very gratefully received!

make a robots.txt with Disallow * in it. Or something like that. google robots.txt 😉

Whoops i didn’t mean .htaccess i meant robots.txt in my original post!

My question is mostly whether me doing that will block them for one time only or if they’ll never visit my site again!

Normally they visit every now and again.

yeah i know they do that but if they encounter a robots.txt saying don’t index anything will they say “oh okay then, bye” and remember to come again or will they remove all my indexed urls? (i doubt they would but it pays to be certain)

yeah i know they do that but if they encounter a robots.txt saying don’t index anything will they say “oh okay then, bye” and remember to come again or will they remove all my indexed urls? (i doubt they would but it pays to be certain)

Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough, what I meant was “Normally, they come back now and then… even with the robots.txt file saying they’re not allowed to index anything”