Should I allow googlebot to crawl now?

[hdpt00]

I am in the process of starting a large content site which is not ready for public release due to the fact a lot of the content I want is not up. However, somehow googlebot has tried to crawl my site, but I blocked all bots in robots.txt.

What I was wondering is if I should let it loose to feed so it doesn't think all this content springs up in 1 day or just wait until I'm ready for my public release and then remove the robots.txt filter? I would choose to do the latter in case anyone who did come to my site from SERPs when the site is not complete might be a permanently lost visitor.

Any thoughts about this?

Also, I see everywhere that people recommend getting a few PR 4+ links to get indexed, is there some simple way of doing this if this is the only site you own and are new to the market? Do I just go around emailing every related site around the time I'm ready to release? How in the world do I convince them to link to a PR 0?

Thanks,
Brandon

[Marcia]

Brandon, it's taking a bit now for newer sites to rank. I'd get it crawled now so there's some PR showing to be able to get links - it's much harder with no PR showing. And then add new content pages gradually over a little time rather than all at once.

[hdpt00]

Any advice on the gettinng links to a pr0 site? I've searched for some stuff here, but it all seems pretty outdated, maybe there are some new methods?

-B

[mars9820]

well the most easy one is to "buy" and go after an Yahoo listing.

Of course there are many other sites that will ask you to pay for a link and pro's con's are discussed in quite a lot of threads over the last couple weeks. (just go through the first page of the google forum and you will find them). I think you should have a clear understanding which sites are worth to pay for a listing and which are not in case you want to walk along this path.

A second option is go after DMOZ. However there is no time given when and if your site will be added. (Besides if your site is under construction it is most likely not added but kept in the submission queue).

Of course you can also search in google/yahoo for KW + add URL and just write nice emails to ask for a link. There are always fan sites or personal sites with webmasters that just want to offer content and don't give a dime about search engines.

Most funny is that these fan sites most of the time rank on the first page of the search engines which makes you wonder how good most SEO are. :D

[kaled]

Submit now and concentrate on getting any money areas tidy. Google likes sites that are constantly changing so the fact that it's growing etc. should work in your favour.

Also start getting backlinks. Set aside an hour a day, or whatever, to do nothing but this. Also make sure that your linktous.html page ready (if you plan to create one).

Also ensure that people link to www.yourdomain.com rather than simply yourdomain.com

Kaled.