Effective way to block all SE crawlers

[skuba]

Hi,
I have created a test site for one of my clients. I don't want that test site to get crawled or indexed on search engines, so I need to block ALL robots.

I know that robots.txt alone won't do it. Do you know a better way to do it?

Do you know the rules I could use on .htaccess to block all crawlers?

Thanks so much

[caveman]

Put it on a dev server, behind a firewall, and PW protect it. Never had a problem doing that.

[skuba]

I don't have access to all that. It's on the same server with the same type of protection, it's just a subdomain.

I need to protect it.

Thanks

[encyclo]

If you have .htaccess, you almost certainly can use Apache basic authentification. Just password-protect the whole subdomain. It doesn't matter if you have a one-letter password that you hand out to everyone in the company - no SE bot will be able to view the site. You could even set the prompt text to "Type User and Pass to view site" and you'd be OK.

[skuba]

Could you explain me how to do that?
Thanks

[encyclo]

Everything explained here:

[httpd.apache.org...]

[skuba]

Done, thanks