How to stop Google indexing your site when it is under construction or maintenance

Prevent search engines from indexing your website during development. Step-by-step methods using robots.txt, meta tags & Search Console.

Written by

Amila Rajapaksha

CEO / Managing Director, Mobiz International (Pvt) Ltd

Amila Rajapaksha is the CEO and Managing Director of Mobiz International (Pvt) Ltd, a web design and development company based in Gampaha, Sri Lanka. Since 2010 he has helped businesses across Sri Lanka and overseas launch fast, search-friendly websites and online stores — working hands-on with WordPress, Magento and custom Laravel builds, and the SEO that makes them rank.

Apr 03, 2017 42 views 265 articles

When you are creating a new website with Joomla or with any other method on a live server, Google might index the half-done pages and give you crappy search results for some time. Best thing is to block google from visiting the site using the good old robots.txt change the content of the robots.txt in the root folder to

User-agent: * Disallow: /

thats it , google will never look at your site untill you remove these lines. So dont forget to replace these codes with original Joomla robots.txt file contents later.

User-agent: * Disallow: /administrator/ Disallow: /cache/ Disallow: /components/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /includes/ Disallow: /installation/ Disallow: /language/ Disallow: /libraries/ Disallow: /media/ Disallow: /modules/ Disallow: /plugins/ Disallow: /templates/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /xmlrpc/

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