Not sure if this is the right forum. Will Google spider a site whose domain isn’t pointed? If the only way to access it is through the IP address, does the Googlebot still crawl it, or does it skip it until it’s pointed?
Thanks!
Yes, Google does crawl via IPs, stopping your http server from responding to IP requests may help.
If you don’t want it indexed, the best way to do that is via the robots.txt file.
Google will happily crawl a site at an IP address only, but only if it can find it. If there are no links to it, Google won’t see it.
Google can only follow links the same way you can. She cannot look in folders and say oh there it is. If there is no link on the web pointing to it google will not slider it
Thanks for the replies. Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish:
I don’t want the site to get indexed until the customer approves it. We’ve had situations where a customer doesn’t get back to us for over a month, then is upset because we used the wrong verbiage in the title tag and description. Meanwhile, Google has indexed the site and the “wrong verbiage” appears in the SERP.
If stopping the server from responding to IP requests will prevent indexing, yet still allow me and the client to view the site via IP, then once the client approves the site, we can make it “live” by pointing the domain.
Will that work? Or is there an easier way that doesn’t involve a separate development server and migrating files?
I’ve had the same problem, John. Google will index pages on the ip address. I usually don’t work on sites for longer than 2 weeks so it’s never really a big issue for me. In your case, I would just block search engine with robots.txt. You can use a plugin for this.
I wonder how Google finds these sites when there are no links. Does it have something to do with Wordpress pinging maybe?
[FONT=Verdana]If you’re using WordPress, then there should be an option somewhere to disallow indexing. (Sorry - I don’t use WP and can’t be more specific.) Otherwise, a robots.txt file with
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
in the root directory should be enough to stop any reputable bot indexing the site.
I read somewhere that Google likes to be mentioned by name, but I can’t remember where I read that* and don’t know how true it is. However, I always add the extra line, just in case. 
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
I’ve never had any problems with that.
*except that it was a source I considered reliable at the time.[/FONT]
Yeah, that’s true. I forgot. You can turn off search engine indexing under Settings: Reading in Wordpress
That’s probably the easiest option. Set that option and then turn it off when the site goes live. Just make sure not to forget to turn it off later.
If its a Wordpress then ya prob settings for anything. But on a normal site if you don’t believe google can’t spider if no links point to it. Then the easiest way is to just password protect the folder. This is what google suggests by the way. Google cannot crawl a password protected folder. Doing it in cpanel only takes 2 or 3 clicks.