3 replies to this topic

[slm64]

Does anyone have any idea whether a "silent" website can help avoid the aging delay when you want to start making noise?

What I mean is, say you know now that you want to launch a website in a year's time (or even later). You have a bit of an idea of the content you want to include, maybe even have some of it. But you don't want to go public with it yet.

As I see it, you can have your growing site up and available to people that you tell about it, but by adding noindex in robots.txt or meta tags, you can prevent premature indexing. This would allow you to control the going public aspect of things.

However, what I'm not sure about is: if you have noindex, do you still get spidered every so often just to check if you're there? If you don't have nofollow, do the spiders still crawl round you and work out what you do have, even though they will respect the instruction not reveal what they know and include you in results? And, if all this goes as described, would this help you get over the aging delay?

In case you wonder if this is underhand or anything, it's not and there is a perfectly legitimate reason. I have a hobby farm that is just in the set-up stages, and my private website is a good way of keeping friends and family updated with what's going on. However, later on we plan to make it a commercial scale enterprise, and of course the site will have an important function in support of that. Some of the information is there already so it seems sensible to make some mileage from it if I can...

Thanks for any ideas,
Sarah

[Jill]

Sarah, it's hard to say for sure, but my guess would be that you'd still be a victim of the aging delay once you really went live.

The delay is partly a function of when they spider you, when they sense real content on the site, and when they first start finding credible links pointing to your site.

[Scottie]

Either it's out there and has links pointing to it, or it's not.

But there's nothing wrong with having a small placeholder site with some basic info until you are ready to really launch it.

If I were you, I'd put up some general information pages for the public, then a password-protected area for family and friends to keep tabs on the progress!

[slm64]

Thanks for your advice Jill and Scottie. I had been thinking that we'd probably end up a little bit above the horizon beforehand, so your answers confirm what I suspected.