I have a site that I want to continue testing before I make public, so I don't want Google to start crawling the site as there will be a large amount of garbage content during testing.I currently have authentication set up using htpasswd, will this prevent site crawlers or robots from crawling my site?
Does htpasswd authentication prevent Google from crawling my site?
web crawlers;authentication;googlebot
Yes, if the site requires authentication then robots will not be able to crawl it.You can also specify a robots.txt file so that the entire site is disallowed