3

I am currently developing a website which is going to take some time to finish. I need to move some 'stuff' to production frequently, while maintaining a under construction status. My front page will clearly mention that my website is under construction.

I know crawlers will access my URL before I am ready to go live. Should I tell them my site is under construction (no need to index)? If yes how?

P.S.: Eventually, I am ok to let them see my under construction front page.

Improve this question
1

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4

If you don't want the search engines indexing your content before you're ready, block them with robots.txt and meta tag.

Improve this answer
2
  • I guess I can discard pages with robot.txt, but what do you mean with meta tag? Can you give an example of what you have in mind?
    – Jérôme Verstrynge
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 16:09
  • It should look like this and go in the head area of each page you want hidden. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> this keeps your URLs from being indexed if there are links pointing to them from elsewhere. Additionally you could leave off the robots.txt and use "noindex, follow" this allows Google to crawl the pages and get information about/from them without adding them to the index. It overlaps somewhat with the robots.txt but is treated a little different.
    – Joshak
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 16:47
-1

Don't worry! Published and be damned! Avoid any mention of 'under construction'. Hey, every site is a work in progress. Maybe you could give us a link so that we could see the problem (or lack of problem).

My guess is that search engines (and readers) will love your site if it keeps on publishing new pages.

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.