Private/Sandbox Site hidden from search engines - how?

[adarack]

If I password protect my public_html folder, will my site still show up in search engines? I am setting up a backup (joomla) site on a different domain from my live site that I can install additional modules and test before going live. I don't want the site to end up in search engine results and I'm looking for the best way of doing this - any and all recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance-
Adam

[AndrewT]

If you password protect it the search engines won't be able to access it nor will anyone else that doesn't have the correct login information.

[adarack]

Thanks Andrew - that's the way I thought it would be but wanted to double check. It's been a while since I've been on the forums but great to see how quickly you responded - Dathorn is awesome!

[brownswo]

Just out of curiosity, would putting this in a robots.txt also stop them (if you didn't want to password protect your public_html) -- or at least the well-behaved ones:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Thanks,
Tom

[AndrewT]

If all bots followed the rules, that would work. But if you really are opposed to something showing up in search results, you don't want to even give it a chance. Password protecting access takes care of this.