I was really unsure of how to title this. I hope I didn't confuse any of us?
So, basically I need to launch a temporary website but plan to revert back to my main site. It's a long story...
What I want to do is a complete overhaul my current site from top to bottom but this change is only temporarily. I could go through my current site change everything but then I'd have to change everything back later. That is a HUGE hassle.
I was thinking that I could upload a new site or clone my current site and make changes at a subfolder like /new. So the new site would be hosted at example.com/new. I could then ask the server to point to the /new folder off of the root and then when people try to access example.com, they see the contents in example.com/new. Does that make sense?
My problem is, I don't want Google scanning /new and assuming that everything that was on example.com before is gone. That might hurt ranking. So, how can I temporarily tell Google to no cache or spider the site as is but still not ignore it completely?
Would telling the robots.txt file to disavow the /new folder do anything? I guess not since technically /new would not exist if the root was pointing to it? In other words, if example.com shows example.com... Google sees the page as example.com and not example.com/new. I also thought about putting a meta tag into the temporary site for nofollow, noindex. no cache but then again Google may mark that and not want ever scan my domain or will they see the meta tag has changed when I revert back to the old site?
Looking for some input.
