How to handle a preliminary site /site during development for searchengines?

Hi Everbody,

Im developing a site for client "online". There is a preliminary first page, the rest will take a while, since the client has to fill in a lot of content.

I "googled" a lot, but in result, im just confused by a lot of different or old explanations.

So my questions:
1. What is the best thing to do, if I want to make sure, users see the actual page. As far as I understood
doesn't really help?

2. What else to I have to keep in mind if I develop "online". What are you doing?

Thanks
Have a nice day
Nudi

You could jsut use a template for the initial page then assign that to the 'Off' page, set the site to offline mode so you can only see it if your logged in.

Hi Tyreal2012,

oh sorry for not beeing clear enough. (Usually I talk too much, so I tried to make it short )
Certainly I don't publish the pages, I dont want to be seen by public.

What I meant is:
There is a priliminary page (and imprint) having nice layout and saying something like "Hey we 're coming soon - visit us at March 15 ..."
So if people go there (because promotion is already running) they see this page.
Unfortunatly the also see this site on march 16th - when we have publish the whole site - because its in cache. That is what happend last time. And Google found the pre-page...:-( for sometime

So what Im looking for is:
How can I prevent the site from beeing cached, should I also make content=Noindex?
Is a meta tag good, or do I need to do us the htaccess for it?

How are you solving these kind of problem?


Thanks a lot
Nudi

Quote from: Nudibranch at Mar 05, 2014, 12:48 PM

There is a preliminary page (and imprint) having nice layout and saying something like "Hey we 're coming soon - visit us at March 15 ..."
So if people go there (because promotion is already running) they see this page.
Unfortunatly the also see this site on march 16th - when we have publish the whole site - because its in cache. That is what happend last time. And Google found the pre-page...:-( for sometime

You can turn your preliminary page into a weblink on publication day and it will do a 301 redirect (although test if you are on IIS 7 - it may not do it right). The 301 is what you want.

That solves everything except your Google problem, which is harder. Google takes days to reflect content changes and 301s.

Your best bet may be to create a page which says "We're coming soon" in an image but which has in the text the message you want displayed to Googlers. This is not ideal - anyone got a better idea?

Unfortunately in my experience in the past theres not really alot you can do about Googles cache, If you dont want google to index the page you can use a Robots.txt to block it, bear in mind to change it afterwards.

Once you move you site to live from the holding page, you sould always clear your website cache anyway, I've never had problems moving a site like this.

This is one of the reasons I use the 'offline' facility in Modx.

hope that helps.