Is wordpress Privacy Settings sufficient for this?

Question

I am going to import my current blog posts on to my future to-be self-hosted wp blog. It will take somedays before I make it the primay blog. In the WP Privacy Settings I have set "Ask search engines not to index this site"

Is this setting enough so as to not affect my current page rankings?

Or do I need to do something else may be messing with robots.txt or anything?

Or are there any side-effects with this settings?

EDIT: It says underneath: "Note: Neither of these options blocks access to your site — it is up to search engines to honor your request."

Answer 1

Install Authenticator. It requires a log-in to access the blog content. A robots.txt is just a recommendation and not safe enough.

Answer 2

Yes Privacy settings is ok ... but it's also extremely easy to put in a robots.txt at the root of your server.

This will not stop spambots or nasty scrapers. If you need harder privacy controls have a look at http://perishablepress.com/category/wordpress/

and create a .htaccess file which only allows your IP address

It all depends on how paranoid you need to be.