Do I need to use meta noindex for my new website before migration?

[esiow2013]

I just want to know your thoughts if it is necessary to add meta noindex nofollow tag in each page of my new website before migrating the old pages to new pages under a new domain? Would it be better if I'll just add a blockage in my robots.txt then remove it once we launch the new website?

Thanks!

[vmialik]

Great idea.  Not necessary needed for every page.  Just a robots.txt file in the root directory with:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This should be sufficient for all the pages until you launch. Just remember set a Google reminder or some other reminder to turn it off When the site is live.

Also remember if you have a robot.txt file in any other directory other than the root, it should be updated accordingly as well.

Hope this helps

[crackingmedia]

I agree with Vadim. The other thing to consider before you remove the robots.txt file is if you want to also update links to any of the old pages to the new pages that are indexed in search engines.

You may be considering discontinuing the site at the old domain or just forwarding all requests to that domain to your new domain. If you do that just as a web forwarder on the domain, any existing links will be directed to page not found. If you don't want that to happen then you will need some form of 301 URL redirection. If your old site is running on a Linux server using apache then you can use a .htaccess file. More info is here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Peter

[vmialik]

Very good point Peter!