I have staging and production apps on Heroku.
For crawler, I set robots.txt file.
After that I got message from Google.
Dear Webmaster, The host name of your site, https://www.myapp.com/, does not match any of the "Subject Names" in your SSL certificate, which were:
*.herokuapp.com
herokuapp.com
The Google bot read the robots.txt on my staging apps and send this message. because I didn't set anything for preventing crawlers to read the file.
So, what I'm thinking about is to change .gitignore file between staging and production, but I can't figure out how to do this.
What are the best practices for implementing this?
EDIT
I googled about this and found this article https://olemortenamundsen.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/ruby-secure-staging-environment-of-your-public-app-from-users-and-bots/
This article says to set basic Rack authentication and you won't need to care about robots.txt.
I didn't know that basic auth can prevent google bot. It seems this solution is better that manipulate .gitignore file.
What about serving /robots.txt dynamically using a controller action instead of having a static file?
Depending on the environment you allow or disallow search engines to index your application.