Avoiding penalty when redesigning a site

What\Where is the best way to store the content to avoid dup

[tictoc]

I am having someone redesign a site of mine but he wants to put the content on his server until he completes the design work - if the googlebot finds this on his server while he tests the work wont this come up as a duplication penalty? or is there a way to avoid this?

[engine]

If you have concerns, just ask the developer to use a robots.txt [webmasterworld.com] file on their server to block indexing of the relevant folder.

[tictoc]

I used the robots.txt validator but it says that the one I used was invalid:
META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

Is there supposed to be a space between NOINDEX , NO FOLLOW like this?

[engine]

That's not a robots.txt file. That's using a META tag on the individual page to control the robot. A robots.txt file is a single file stored in the root. The META tag would need to be on every page.

Here are some tutorials.

META tag robots exclusion [robotstxt.org]

Robots exclusion protocol [robotstxt.org]

[tictoc]

Thanks Engine!

one more question here about the No Follow command:

When you use the
META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"

is this command telling the Googlebot to leave the site and not go back to the page it came from on the site OR does it tell it to goto another page on the site and avoid this page?

[Lorel]

I often start new sites on my own domain until they are satisfied with results. I use a meta noindex/nofollow on every page. Then when I upload it to the new site I take it off. I haven't had a problem so far.