From an SEO point of view, is it better to let the search engines know of a new site even thought it is not yet finished, or should I wait until I finish it before letting search engines crawl it? I'm thinking of I let it out now, it can start going through the age filters, but I'm afraid it might get some penalties put on because of lack of content. What do you guys think?
Get some content on it, and release it to the SE's as soon as possible. It doesn't have to be the final content - that can follow later when you've finished it. I've started putting a holding page on all my new sites and build links to that page well before the site is ready to be released to the public. As a holding page, I write something specific to what the site will be about. Does this actually work ?? I honestly have no idea, but I can't see that it will do any harm.
I usually get the structure (filenaming and link naming) completed first, doesn't really matter if any major content is on the page. At that point, start getting backlinks to your site. It will take the SE's a while to get the content of the site anyway. Good luck
It´s a good question G76. I used to think that the more developed the website was before launching the better but IMHO G´s sandbox effect has made it almost necessary to get your pages on-line as soon as they are vagely acceptable. Knowing that no-one will see them for months to come, you´ve plently time to tidy up, while the domain trickles slowly through Goog´s big sand-timer. On a related but slightly different path, I have a site that I am working on at the moment. It will take me weeks, maybe months to get round to finishing all the pages, but I am really keen to get it up in Adsense. The TOS says no dead links... I could build the site, adding pages every week as I have the time. That is probably the way I´ll go, but waiting till I reach that critical mass point where I am comfortable launching the site is torture.
I assume you would have "deadlinks" because the navigation is in place but all the pages they point to are not done. The easy answer to that problem is just put up a standard "Under Construction, check back often" message on all the incomplete pages -- you could do it with a SSI file -- and publish the site. If I had any time at all I would do titles and meta tags for all these pages and worry about content later. If you really can write the meta description in advance just repeat it on the page and you'll even have some preliminary content.
IIRC, an adsense condition is that it's not on under construction sites. I personally update the index page of a website as and when a new link (navigation or whatever) is required. If you know the exact name of the pages you'll be uploading in the future, then use a php (or similar) index page and have it check whether the file exists. If it exists then so the link if it doesn't exist then don't show the link. That shouldn't be more than a couple of lines of code.
Compar, I´d love to launch the whole site based on the site map, 10% of pages customised and a hot plan. Do you really think I could avoid a penalty by launching the site and running adsense via a footer/header even if most of the pages were still empty? I am a bit lost with this site but I know what I bought is pretty bloody useless unless I can make it unique and thati s going to take much longer than I bargained for when I bought the domain.
I have always started linking to new domains before the sites were even close to done in order to get the search engines to recognize me and then rank me faster. It does make a difference how the search engines find you though. If you are found thru a link farm you are more likely to be sandboxed than if you are found thru a DMOZ listing. That of course would require your site to be up and accepted within the ODP database. A few good links (2 or 3) from strong domain names (domain names that have been indexed in Google for 2+ years with rankings) is what I would recommend if you don't wanna wait/ have the confidence in getting a DMOZ listing anytime too soon.
I wouldn't run the AdSense ads on empty or under construction pages. That was never my thought, but I wouldn't hesitate to run them on the 10% of the finished pages and have the other 90% under construction and with no AdSense ads. Beside that, if you did try to run an AdSense ad on an empty page what would the ads be about. Google has got to find content to know which ads to display.
Yes.thanks Compar, I kind of hijacked Goo76´s thread here which wasn´t my intention at all. You guys have given me lots to think about and I hope G76 gets as much out of this thread as I did. Thx everyboby!
I don't think you really have. The answers offered you are germane to G76's original question. You just gave us a little more detail to work with. Now if AC had joined this thread that would be a different matter entirely