Site update strategies

What is best to minimize risks linked to SE crawling during site update?

[loobot]

My concern is to avoid having a SE while I am ftp'ing fresh pages to my site.

One strategy is to set a temporary index.htm dedicated to site maintenance time interval, but the SE should consider that the site content drastically changed, with all the bad effects which could derive from this mis-interpretation of the supposed site content.

Are there proven strategies for this purpose?

Thanks.

[keyplyr]

I really don't understand what you are asking here, but I will guess and give you a boost up to the top.

I don't see why uploading your pages should be a concern. If a robot is crawling your website and misses a new page because you are in the process of uploading, oh well - they'll get it next time, or maybe even get it right then with a second crawl.

I advise leaving your old page up. If you are testing the function ability of new pages prior to showtime and cannot use a local test server, you can create a test directory that is disallowed via robots.txt and upload all your new pages there, test them, then overwrite the old pages when final. Or you could just test one page at a time, using a noindex meta tag.

Be careful about posting an index.htm(l) page that says "site under maintenance" as Google and other bots may use that text as your site description. Coincidentally, that is what has happened to a competitor of mine and I chuckle every time I see it. Best to use a graphic so the announcement cannot be parsed. and keep the original title and meta description wording to keep your SERP ranking.