A site can’t be created in a minute; even if you prepare content beforehand, you need time to carefully upload it, settle all technical issues, make sure everything is working fine, etc. The best way to handle this properly and avoid screwing up things at the very start is as follows:
- Don’t show “under construction” notice to search bots – by this you risk wasting your chance getting indexed properly on the spot and you will have to work much more to get them come back and change their opinion about your site.
They come by once, see next to nothing worth indexing, index what there is (zip) and won’t come back for a long time as they have already classified the site as being basically empty.
- It might be wise to put a holding page to update your casual visitors of your upcoming site status but let it return 503 header status-code to invite crawlers return later:
The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay.
(A traditional way to keep search engines off the site which is not ready yet, is to ban them in Robots.txt, however the above method seems more reasonable.)
- (not a strict rule, rather a recommendation) Better don’t use parking service that creates a page full of adds – it might be confusing for both visitors and search engine crawlers.
I am sorry but I would never do any of this. Why not work within a dev environment and then push changes live? Your website should NEVER be down during changes and updates.
@Jaan, probably you are right… I for one have run a huge dynamic partially user-generated project that I couldn’t help testing online for a week or so. For small sites or blogs it is wiser to just roll out the complete version (and then steadily grow it)
If the website is still not ready, I think it’s a good idea to block robots with the “nofollow” code. This is a temporary situation and it shows that you respect your readers. After all, keeping visitors is more important than attracting.
You could do a beautiful Flash animation indicating Under Construction – with a paragraph about the firm.
It is important that you get on the search engines as soon as you can because there is a delay for new sites to show up. And an even further delay to build quality backlinks.
Well…if you got cpanel, you could always password protect your site until it´s ready.
This is great information and I agree password protecting could do the trick!
it’s been a while since I worked on my website and I forgot how to get back on it. ): could you help me?