Hi I'm in the process of building a new site which will provide more specific and indepth information about a topic which I breifly cover on my main site. I want to link from the existing site to the new site in order to give visitors the greatest value and information. Do people think I should link to the new site immediately or wait until its been indexed or until gained some PR? I'd eventually like the new site to rank higher than my main site because it will be more specific. Thanks
I would not link to your new site until it is ready for visitors. Getting your site indexed while it is under construction only leads to issues. You only get the benefit of the "Google Honeymoon" once in a site's life... the first few days or weeks after it is first indexed. In fact, I would have a robots.txt file like: User-agents: * Disallow: / to prevent the engines from indexing it until you are done building it and it's ready for prime time ESPECIALLY if there is any chance of URLs changing. Once the site is ready for visitors, I would immediately remove the above lines from your robots.txt and link to it from your main site. This will help get it indexed. There is nothing wrong with this if the two sites are related in topics. You don't have to wait for other sites to link to it first.