One thing that’s common among all SEO-related forums are the large amounts of assistance requests from people who are just beginning the sometimes long process of improving their site for the search engines.
With these requests, you find lots of questions concerning the very basic and often misunderstood concepts like meta tags or keyword density. This is when you realize that in SEO, there will always be those who are just starting to address the necessary changes and alterations to have an effective search presence.
This brings me to a WebProWorld topic that started with the poster asking a beginner question about submitting to search engines. However, this question quickly led to an interesting topic about how search engines treat sites considered to be under construction. The original poster asked the WPW audience whether or not he should submit a site that hasn’t been completed yet.
The immediate responses to the posters question concerned the effectiveness of submitting sites to search engines (waste of time); however, the responses quickly tackled the subject of incomplete sites and how search engines approach them. According to many of the respondents, it will not hurt your rankings at all if a search engine happens to index a site still in the construction phase. One of WPW’s moderators, cbp, addressed this topic directly with the following response:
I have two new sites working on — may not be ready until end of year, but have a couple of discrete links from other sites of mine them already (mainly in order to partially get a round the domain age part of the alleged google sandbox)
Poster WebNovice also offered the original poster advise based on past experiences:
I was getting IBL’s while my site was still “under Construction” Most site’s (not all) don’t care of you status it’s just about getting links period. By the time my site was finished I had a PR3 with 100’s of IBL’s
Finally, poster tvcrazyman offered some sound advice as well:
It’s actually a good idea to go ahead and get the google bot and other search engines coming in as soon as possible by getting links to your site. This way every time the robot comes back it will see new content, and it will come sooner the next time, assuming you are working on your site on a daily basis.
As you can see from the above comments, getting your site into Google as soon as possible seems to be an effective strategy, especially if you want to avoid a potential sandbox stay. Sites considered to be under construction usually add new content on a frequent basis, which can favorably affect the frequency in which a search bot crawls your site. However, active crawling by a search engine bot does not guarantee a high ranking. This is more for the benefit of a search index because the search companies like to ensure their content is fresh.
On the other hand, a site that adds new relevant content can also be viewed by a search engine as being or becoming an authority in the field associated with the site, which can be beneficial with how your site is perceived.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
