Site Under Construction - Serp #1 - PR6

How does a site under construction get a PR6?

[nativenewyorker]

For a competitive shopping search term that comes up with 1,200,000 results on Google, the #1 listing is a page that says "This site under construction....".

It has a PR6 and 6 backlinks, one of which is the Google directory and 2 from DMOZ.

Can someone shed some light on this?

Thanks,
Ted

[keeper]

Someone bought a defunct (but previously popular) domain, and is developing a new website to take the old ones place?

[percentages]

Yup, a defunct domain name is one possibility.

Another is that the domain name is something very close to another domain name and link errors have occurred.

I bought a domain name in mid December (5 letter Acronym name that is perfect for the purpose I have in mind), put up most of the home page but all of the navigation options lead to Under Contruction pages.

To my surprise after the Jan 1st update this site is now receiving over 2,000 visitors per day. It has a PR 6, and still numerous Under Construction pages.

I checked my back links, there should have been zero, but discovered several high PR sites linking to me. One in Iran of all places and stating my domain is one of the most important on the web, up there with Yahoo, MSN and the like?

Then I realised the error, they had simply typed the domain name on that page incorrectly! They had mistyped a letter "I" as a letter "L" and low and behold they were not alone, several other sites had done this also :)

Santa Clause does exist after all :)

[rfgdxm1]

One other possibility. The owner of this "under construction" domain as soon as they bought it put it online, and immediately added links from some other high PR sites they have. They just haven't got around to developing it yet.

[coconutz]

>>They just haven't got around to developing it yet.

Highly unlikely that this is a new site that hasn't been "developed" or it wouldn't have the google directory and dmoz backlinks.

[rfgdxm1]

Good point. This should be reported to the ODP to get this site removed.

[vitaplease]

Maybe you are giving Google ideas.

and in the future pages with "This site under construction...." will temporarily not be indexed.

3,2 million results in Google for that search query ;)

[Dynamoo]

and in the future pages with "This site under construction...." will temporarily not be indexed.

Including this one now ;)

[nativenewyorker]

It is actually surprising that Google does not have something in their algorithm that ignores "This page is under construction" notices. In many cases, it would be able to separate the real thing about discussions of it just by comparing keyword density.

Ted

[jamesyap]

The site is old, very old, but once popular na dhave a lot of links to it. And those 'a lot of' sites who link to it also too old and never ever update their site. So the PR stay with the site. I think ...

For why it stays #1, you should check its cache page. Is there anything? I think there must be something because even there are something call the fresh bot, most searched base solely on the database after the dance every month. so I guess the 'under construction' is place only after the deep crawl and the dance.

[Beachboy]

<<"This site under construction....">>

3.2 millions results...wonder how many searches are done each month for that phrase. Do ya think it's worth optimizing for? What could we sell to that crowd? ;)

[jamesyap]

They are stupid, they should say

'We are upgrading our server, please come back later'

[Mikkel Svendsen]

Under construction pages is far from all that fluctuates Google (and other major engines) indexes. Robots.txt, CSS-files, JavaScript files, 404 errors, own search result pages are just a few of the strange things that get indexed in most major engines.

A long time ago I went through most of these for an article and the numbers are surprisingly high - and any engine could easily remove all of this.

So the question is why don't they? :)

[Yidaki]

Did you directly click the google listing for this site or did you type / copy the url into a new window? Just asking because the site perhaps redirects based on the referer and gives a "under construction" error if the site gets requested directly without any referer.

I've seen this numerous times especially with formerly expired domains that are now used as cloaked doorway domains for affiliates ...

[nativenewyorker]

Clicking on the Google link in the SERP and copy / pasting the URL in a new window has no difference. The keywords are not in the title or anywhere on the page. I even checked the source to see if the keywords were mentioned.

You would think that taking out pages titled "under construction" would be easy. How can Google or any other search engine pretend to be so advanced when they can't even address this simple issue? GoogleGuy, how about a charge to the algorithm. Pages indexed by Google would go down 3 million pages, but they would at least be more relevant.

Ted

[rfgdxm1]

>They are stupid, they should say
'We are upgrading our server, please come back later'

Heh. Yeah, customizing this is easy. ;)