Christmas & New Year Crawling

[thepcstore]

We currently have excellent Google results and don't want to do anything to mess that up. However, we're wanting to have a sale between christmas and the new year through our online store.

What we don't want it to get the temporary sale pages indexed, so I need to check out a few things.

I have 4 options for our sale:

- Setup forwarding to a sub domain, such as christmas-sale.mydomain.co.uk
- Use .htaccess to redirect all traffic to the sub-domain.
- Use some PHP to redirect all Internet Explorer and Netscape, while leaving anyone else (Google & co) to browse the standard site.
- Make some big changes to our site, and risk breaking it all. :(

However, there's a few things in question:

1) Is Google likely to do a craw of any sort during the update at the end of the month which is likely to alter our results?

2) Are any of the methods above likely to be considered spamming or in any way unfair (we don't cheat our results :))

Ideally, I'd like to use the sub-domain so I can have the site ready and working, so when it goes live I know it'll work... However, I don't want Google to fall out with us. :)

Anyone got any nice ideas?

[werty]

would it be possible to make a robots.txt file telling the bots not to crawl your temperary sale directories?

also i am pretty sure you can do there is a no index meta tag.

someone else here is likely to give detailed explanations on how to do both.

good luck.
george

[thepcstore]

Both methods are possible, but the nature of the site (all the programs and stuff) it would not be practical to use a sub directory, and the no-index and robots option would be likely to screw it up for us in janurary...