Preloading pages for search engines via cloaking.

[Brett_Tabke]

Anyone "preload" pages in search engines? Pages that are not ready, or time sensitive and can't be seen by the public yet. Things such as release notices, software prereleases, or other time sensitive documents?

I've done this for a few years with some entire websites that weren't open to the public yet. Seems to work ok for the most part, and sense the data DOES exist and is going to exist by the time the lathargic search engines update, I don't see a problem with it. In fact, it helps the engines by giving surfers timely info about upcoming features and news.

For example, I have a friend who has "preloaded" a serious site full of info about a product to be released in late june. He's submitted to most of the major engines and kept the data hidden via cloaking. When the product goes live, he'll uncloak the site. Searchers will instantly find the data they are after when the "buzz is hot" about the product.

[WebGuerrilla]

Wow, and all this time I thought I was the only one who did this. :(

I have, on more than one occasion, used cloaking to kill the lag time from submission to listing. If a new site is still in production, but the content is done, putting it up in advance can mean new traffic from day one.

[agerhart]

If you could bare with me for a second, I am little bit confused about this.

I understand the concept that you are speaking about, and I can see why this would bring good, or quicker, results.

My question is this: If you are still developing the site, then what are you going to give the SE's to feed on?

[Air]

It works great, it used to work better from a positioning point of view, when the engines updated more frequently. I could actually go through a few updates and even tweak the page(s), by the time the site was ready - boom, instant traffic.

It still works, it just takes longer, which I suppose is even more reason to do it now, cuts down on the long lag times.