rewrite

hi, i have a 2 blogs in development and another blog live...essentially, the blogs in development are the live blog split up...so to speak.

unfortunately, google and other search engines have started indexing the blogs in development...

should i, for now, use the rewrite rule, or something else to tell google, and other search engines not to read the development blogs, or, should i use the rewrite rule and have them access the live blog?

i have blog.mydomain.com (develoment)
and mydomain.com/blog/ (live)

blog2.mydmain.com
and mydomain.com/blog/?cat=13 (live)

or is there something else i should do?

i also don't know how to create an .htaccess file for either thingy-ma-jibber, so if either is the way to go, can someone point me in the direction of where to find more info?

thanks
barbara

You can put a meta tag in the header to tell bots to not index the site

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

or you can do the same by creating robots.txt in the root of the site with the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

These will essentially do the same.

You could use htaccess in the control panel under goodies to set a password for the development sites preventing access unless the password is provided. When ready you can just remove the password.

If you want to be a bit more clever about the htaccess you could try Prevent or allow domain access for a specified range of IP addresses

More codes

actually, i think i want whomever finds it to end up at the old blog right now, since google has already starting indexing.

is the htaccess rewrite what i need to do that?