Migrating to Joomla but avoiding google etc till ready

[cmendla]

I am migrating sites from frontpage to Joomla. Some of the sits are large enough that it will take a week or so to migrate

The problem I have is that I don't want duplicate content. I don't want to just make the site 'unpublished' in joomla and I don't quite trust robots.txt.

What I am considering is setting all of the articles to 'registered only' so that only registered users can see the new site. That should keep the googlebot from seeing the site since I won't supply the credentials to google sitemap.

When I am ready to make the migration, I get rid of the old site and change the public side of the new site to 'public'.

I think that would be an relatively manageable way to handle the migration and prevent duplicate content penaltied (and user confusion between the old and new sites)

I'm just wondering if I am overlooking anything here.

thanks

chris

[travelin cat]

How about creating a directory that is .htaccess password protected to install your Joomla site. That way you can test the site when it's live by entering the username/password combo and then removing the .htaccess restrictions when you want the site to be found by the search engines?

[ergophobe]

One other thing, if you are overlaying the site on the same domain and not on a subdir, you'll run into issues if you have both an index.html and Joomla I think

[cmendla]

ergophobe - Thanks, I had missed that aspect.

Right now I am working with the site without activating any of the three SEO options in the control panel. IOW, not using the www.mysite.com/page.html type urls.

My plan is to implement the SEO funtions during the day of migration. Part of this is due to the fact that I have never been able to mess successfully with the .htaccess file in a frontpage based site.

thanks.

[ergophobe]

never been able to mess successfully with the .htaccess file in a frontpage based site.

Yup... I was putting a CMS over a frontpage site for someone who didn't want the CMS to run the home page. It just doesn't work for most PHP-based CMS that route all requests through index.php