Exactly When is the Right Time to Launch your Site?
Slow down… take a breath… and STOP! One of the most common things I have noticed over the past month and the release of the N1Way Guide, is that many of us are pushing our sites out to the search engines and visitors before they are truly ready. In this post, I am going to look at one simple aspect to use for EVERYTHING you do on your site… working backwards. If you work from the bottom-up, your site will be an instant success… otherwise, it may just crash and burn!
What is Working Backwards?
If you get to section 5 of the N1Way Guide, you will see that when they talk about a launch, Adam and Kelvin are very specific in stating that your HOME page should be the LAST Page you build. The reason for this is pretty simple to understand… WHY do you want anyone coming into your site when its not done?
Working Backwards is the process of building your site from the bottom up… in other words:
- Build your Review Pages FIRST (Whether its 5, 10, 25, or 100, make sure your reviews are up first!)
- Build Your Review Category Pages Second (Linking to your reviews)
- Build Your Guide Pages Next (Also linking within your guides, to your reviews)
- Build your Content Pages (about, links, privacy, etc) Next
- Finally… When ALL of this content is done and ready for action, build your Home page!
As you build the site – each “next” section gets easier to build on its own, because you already have all of the content in place to draw from.
Preventing Indexing Before You are Ready
If you want to prevent a site from being indexed before its ready – add a robots.txt file to the root of your domain folder. In other words, it will come up with www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Inside the file, place two simple lines for now:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
That tells all robots who pay attention to it – “Hey, I’m not ready for you yet – Go Away”
As soon as your site is DONE and the homepage is completed (LAST), you just remove the / from the disallow line, and add a sitemap reference, and you are done! When you do launch, your robots.txt will be:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
Then you head to a place like Pingler, and submit your site to search engines and directories that follow the ping.
(Note: If you want to block admin pages, add them to the disallow line: Disallow: /admin)
Signs Your Site is NOT Ready to Launch
- You Have ANY Blank Pages!
- You Have Any Pages saying “Coming Soon”
- You Have Adsense and its Showing Public Service Ads
- You Have ANY Broken Image Links
- You have Less than 200 Words on EVERY Review page
The Bottom Line
Building your site from the bottom up will assure you never prematurely launch a site! When the robots come, they will have a wide selection to index, when visitors come, they will see exactly what they were looking for and increase the probability of your site being a success, from day 1!
Excellent information as usual, even though I had not done that, I’ve now done the robots file to say what you have suggested until I’m further along (unless you think that the site I’m building is ok to go even though it still needs more content added)
Great post! This is one of the things I really love about the N1WAY guide. For the first time, I actually know when I’m done with a site. That is a great feeling! And I never before considered creating the Home page last.
Rochelle
Mark,
I agree with Rochelle. One of the things that kills most internet marketers is a lack of an all-in-one, step by step guide to go from an idea to a site making money. Most of the programs out there focus on one piece of the puzzle and leave WAY too much to chance.
Your post is perfect because most of us think that we can’t be making anything until our site is up and may cut corners that really hurt us. Like getting indexed before we have anything to offer a visitor. BAD!
Thanks for taking the time to put the N1Way guide into perspective as far as getting the finished product up only when it’s ready.
Jeff
In WP, would checking: “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” in the Privacy setting accomplish the same thing?
Yes. If that setting is selected, WordPress inserts a meta tag into each and every page directing search engine robots not to index the page, and not to follow any links on the page either.
Here is Google’s take on it: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html
@Jon – Exactly right Jon!
As a matter of fact, Since WordPress 2.7, the noindex, nofollow is AUTOMATICALLY set to that during the install. You have to manually go into your privacy settings and change it when the site launches.
wp-admin > settings > Privacy > allow ALL > Save.
Mark
I like the idea of working backwards but do we want to present the completed site to Google all at once. Surely Google prefers to see the continued updating of content rather than 50 reviews suddenly appearing?
@ Jamie -
The jury is out on which method works best… I have done it both ways and the reason I prefer to have everything done at time of launch, is that it lets you write most of your guides in time for the launch.
Mark
Thanks Mark, fair enough.
Mark,
After my wp site began getting indexed, I noticed Google was indexing, pages such as privacy policy, about us, and tag pages. Some WP gurus suggest noindexing Tag and category pages and archives due to threat of duplicate content penalty.
With A N1WAY site using site structure as you have detailed (ie, everthing in posts)are there any pages/posts you would overtly set to noindex or nofollow?
-Ross-
@Ross – Hey Ross – There are alot of variables that go into your question, but as far as “Single Pages or Single Posts” go, I do not worry about blocking spiders. Those pages are important and should be indexed.
Tag, Category styled pages, and other “Index” type pages, can have a negative effect when you show full text posts. BUT THEY DO HAVE VALUE! The easiest way to make sure you don’t get duplicate content issues is to show excerpts on your category, tag and index pages.
On this site, the category pages only show excerpts. (Example)
ALWAYS ask yourself one question before you EVER block a search spider. Q: Am I doing this to please my visitors, or search engines?
If you are doing it to please visitors… then do it. If you are doing it for search engines, do something else, like write a new post to please your visitors.
M
Mark,
Thats exactly what I was hoping – that my tag pages and archives were various length exerpts and therfore would not be considered dupe content
Thanks for the help,
Ross
Mark,
I’m feeling really stupid right now (actually, I’m multi-tasking way too much right now and not giving my full attention to this issue), but I can’t remember how to make sure my categories show excerpts. Please refresh my memory.
Thanks,
Rochelle
@Ross – No prob… I have REALLY stopped doing ANYTHING special for SEO. Concentrate on clear titles, that clearly explain what the page is about. Thats about it!
@Rochelle – I have coded a function into wordpress that I use based on “the_content_limit” plugin, but on your category and index pages, you can just make sure it is setup to to use the_excerpt, versus the_content.
the_excerpt()
Look at the index.php file or category.php file on the Niche Store Strategies theme, you will see it in there.
Mark
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