How to prevent an Heroku app from Google indexing?

Question

Inspite of searches, I didn't find a final answer to this.

I have 2 apps in Heroku:

• myapp-stagging.herokuapp.com
• myapp-with-real-domain-name.com

These 2 apps have no content for now (there are not indexed in Google)

Before pushing content to them, I'd like to be sure that my stagging app will be not indexed in Google. What is the right way to do it? I don't understand because people talks about robots.txt but where am I supposed to write this file?

Thanks.

PS : is SO the right StackExchange site to ask this? Sorry if not.

Answer 1

I found a similar question on Webmasters StackExchange: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/65378/31283

You could add a link rel canonical tag on every page of your app.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://myapp-with-real-domain-name.com" />

Answer 2

Take a look for complete instruction here - http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt

I guess it give you idea where to place robots.txt