How can you set SEOmoz to work with your dev site behind an htpasswd?

[dseo241]

All sites need to be developed from the small to the grand - and this takes time. Development usually takes place on a subdomain different from our live domain. It is locked down behind an htpasswd during development so its not picked up by searching engines - that may create duplicate content issues if when the site goes live it has already scanned our site on the development server. Its also a security implementation to keep the site away from prying eyes before its ready for launch There could be security holes that have not been tweaked.

Whats the best strategy to get SEOmoz involved in this scenario. Its tools are invaluable to the SEO part of the build - but the seomoz crawler bot has a different IP address  (being cloud based) - so we cannot just let a single IP address through our htpasswd.

Also is there a way to link the dev and live site in seomoz - so when it goes live to maintain all teh same logs without having to create two seperate site campaigns?

Thanks!

[ShaMenz]

Hey Robert!

Yes, everything is good here, thanks. Just been hectic around here lately and yes, I've been feeling bad about missing my time in Q&A

[RobertFisher]

Good answer there Sha. Glad to see your smiling face, thought you were hiding! Hope all is well down under.

[ShaMenz]

Hi dseo241,

Given that your question specifically relates to Roger's ability to access your sites (both dev & production), I think you would be best to email the SEOmoz Help Team direct - help at seomoz.org.

I use the stand alone Crawl Test tool to run a base crawl of our dev sites, which are noindexed, but not behind an htpassword, so you would still need to ask the Help Team about accessibility. Incidentally, the SEOmoz User-agent is rogerbot.

Hope that helps,

Sha