What's the best way to make sure our non-production website is hidden by search engines?
Question
How can we stop our Sandbox or Staging website from being indexed by search engines and bots?
Answer
Adding a noindex tag to your website or content will tell search engines not to index your website. However, there are situations where a webpage or website that is marked noindex can still be discovered.
Arc XP helps you solve this problem by offering "Cookie Authentication" for your websites. Arc XP will provide you with a special URL, that will automatically add a cookie to your browser. Each user that should have access to your website only has to visit this URL once. We set your website to only be visible to browsers with the cookie set.
Since search engines will not have access to the special URL, or the cookie, they will not be able to view your website.
Open a ticket with ACS to have cookie authentication set up for your website.