I've heard that you shouldn't let search engines index your development server.  The reasons given were:Duplicate content penaltiesCustomers making purchases from an unsecured domain (if eCommerce)These issues may seem relatively minor and I'm not sure it would be enough to convince someone to put in the effort to lock down the server.  Aren't there broader security concerns?  What should be secured and why?
Why should you prevent a search engine from indexing your development server?
web development;security
The most glaring and obvious problem with this is the fact that your development server is even publicly accessible.Search engine penalties and other related issues aside, there are a plethora of problems with having your dev server unsecured.While there's nothing wrong with having your dev server on the Internet, it should at the very least be password-protected so as to prevent unauthorized access of what may be insecure and and otherwise immature code.Password-protecting Apache can be accomplished through use of .htpasswd. For IIS you modify the Authentication and Access Control settings.