---
title: "How to prevent crawling of non-public ACSF domains"
date: "2022-03-11T00:29:12+00:00"
summary: "Block search engines from crawling non-public ACSF domains using .htaccess rules and a custom no_robots.txt file."
image:
type: "article"
url: "/site-factory/help/92461-how-prevent-crawling-non-public-acsf-domains"
id: "e4b3d1a3-5c83-4193-a467-2431eaa2ab5c"
---

Until a platform-wide solution is in place, the best practices approach is to add the following code to your codebase:

In the \`.htaccess\` file in the docroot, add

    # Ensure non-live sites prevent robots from crawling. This is similar to what
    # Acquia Cloud does for the *.acquia-sites.com domains.
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \.acsitefactory\.com$ [NC]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /robots.txt [NC]
    RewriteRule ^ no_robots.txt [L]

And add a file called \`no\_robots.txt\` to the docroot with the following contents:

    #
    # no_robots.txt
    #
    # This file prevents indexing of domains in the acsitefactory.com DNS zone
    #
    # See also: https://docs.acquia.com/cloud-platform/manage/domains/#crawling-is-blocked-for-acquia-sites-com-domains
    #
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /