How making a test bed fully not SE accessible

Everything tied to the DN nofollow noindex

[henry0]

I have a server test bed with its own DN
How could I make sure that this test bed will never be indexed?
I obviously do not want doing this one page at a time
thanks

[Receptional Andy]

Password protection is the best option. Robots.txt will block spiders but the URL may still show in search results.

[henry0]

Never thought about using a PW protection;
but as you mentionned still need to deal with the URL
My problem is that I need it to be live and not on my local machines - aside me it is also accessed by my CSS person and graphic partner -

[Receptional Andy]

There should be no reference in search result if you use password protection. This can, however, happen with a robots.txt disallow if links to the test server exist somewhere.

If you use HTTP authentication spiders all receive a 401 or 403 response since they don't supply login credentials, and search engines don't list pages with these status codes.

[henry0]

in that case this should fine since there are no inbound links

[Receptional Andy]

You may be surprised at how links can crop up to a site, so I would always advise a password. There's also the potential for discovery via toolbars if you send out a link to anyone.

[lammert]

My problem is that I need it to be live and not on my local machines - aside me it is also accessed by my CSS person and graphic partner

If there wil only be a handful of people working with the site, you can make the site accessible for those IPs. In Apache .htaccess this would be something like:

Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 111.111.111.111 222.222.222.222

[henry0]

Thanks,
I like that solution.