I recently created a new website and as soon as I had the hosting set-up I uploaded a coming soon page, and then when the complete site was done I basically replace this coming soon page as expected. The issue I saw with this (if you want to call it an issue) is that search engines basically indexed the coming soon page, so when I uploaded the whole site it took almost a month for the search engines to re-index which is not the end of the world but it would be nice if we could prevent from indexing during construction time, then I started wondering what would be the best practice to do this without affecting SEO.
What do you do when you start a new site, do you add a coming soon page with some sort of meta tags asking the boots not to index or you simply wait and upload the entire site when its complete?
How about maintenance time, how do you let the search engines know that the page is currently down for maintenance?
Can some be so kind and tell me what would be the best way to accomplish this or direct me where I can find info about?
If you don’t want the searchbots to index anything until the site goes live, you could block them using robots.txt or meta tags.
Alternatively, you could set an ‘expires’ date on the ‘coming soon’ page of about the date you think the new site will be ready, and that should encourage them to come back then to get the new page. (I’m not sure how effective that technique is, I’ve never tried it myself!)
In terms of maintenance, I would always try to avoid having your site down for any appreciable time. Ideally, you create a ‘dry run’ of the site (probably blocking access to bots) in parallel to the main site, and then only when you’re sure everything is good to go do you start changing anything on the live site.
I’m not so sure that’s the best strategy … Google adjusts its crawl rate depending on the quality of your content and how often your page is updated. If you have a single static page there for several weeks with little content on it, Google is going to decide that there’s not a lot of point in coming back to your site frequently because there’s hardly anything there and it doesn’t change. That could slow down the full indexing of the site when it is up and running if you aren’t careful.
It is better to block your site through robots.txt until you put any content on it. Also remember that coming soon or under construction page should not be submitted into Google webmaster tool.
Google is going to decide that there’s not a lot of point in coming back to your site frequently because there’s hardly anything there and it doesn’t change. That could slow down the full indexing of the site when it is up and running if you aren’t careful.
Good point.
Set up a Google Webmaster Tools account and tell Google when you want the bot to recrawl your site.
I didn’t know this was possible, I haven’t seen this option in the Webmaster Tools. I will take a closer look.
Is this the same for sites that gets on a lag by not having new posts for say a couple of weeks to a month? If that is the case then, site owners and site managers should do the stunt of “juggling” placing new content to the said site while taking care of the viral marketing stuff for it’s promotion so as to tend to both needs in a balanced-manner.