When is a website considered "live"?

Please read and respond.

[Eterion]

Ive seen this reference many times in regards to a website going "live". I assume thats when the webmaster submits their site to the search engines. Question though, I havent finished building my website, but I like to occasionally "publish" it so I can view if I have the right links and everythings working ok. My concern is that 95% of the material on my website is original content, and I'd rather not see a competitor pop in and steal my material before my site even becomes known to the outer world.
So my question is, as long as we don't submit our website to ANY search engine-would it be safe to say that UNLESS a person knows my exact URL (and no one but me knows that and my registrar obviously), then no one should be able to find it? Thanks ahead for any help, I know this is a very general question, but seeing how I just became a webmaster again a few days ago... I'm really curious.

[tigger]

so long as you have no links pointing to the site in theory you will be fine

[MarkHutch]

Tigger is right. The only problem you might have is with web spiders that dig deep into to domain registration companies for new domains. Also, many web host offer webstats and log files that are visible to web spiders via their primary domain.

It's possible, but pretty unlikely they will find you this way. Even if they did your PR ranking would be so low that it would be very hard for your pages to come up under normal searches.

[Span]

Be careful with clicking on links that point to other sites. Your page might show up as referer.

[sonjay]

It wouldn't hurt to include a robots.txt file on the site, as well:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Any (well-behaved) spiders that do manage to find the site would see that and go away.

[The Contractor]

besides, robots.txt I would put up a dummy index page also.

[Eterion]

hmm thanks you guys for all your help.
I actually dont know what a robot.txt file is, altho ive seen the file in my folder I just dont want to mess around with anything unfamiliar... gosh I must admit though, webmastering a few years ago wasnt this complicated. Ah well, contractor-i like your idea of putting up a dummy index page. :) But if my dummy page gets indexed... and a bot finds it completely "unworthy" of even being mentioned again, when I update and go live with my site, will the bot ever return to change its opinion?

[The Contractor]

just put up an index page with yourdomain.com as the only text on the page and the title tag. Yes, they will come back after opening it up as soon as you get a link or two going to it. In all reality they shouldn't visit it unless you have links from other sites pointing at it.

Robots text: simply open up a blank page in notepad or other text editor and put the following in it, save it as robots.txt, and upload it to the root of your public website folder where your home/index page is:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Don't forget to remove/alter that when your site is completed ;)

[monkeythumpa]

Just because you are hiding does not mean it is not live. In my company we have dev servers and production servers. Since the dev servers are only accessable from our network nothing on those servers are live. Once it is moved to production it is live because the general public can see it. It is live if someone can type in the url and see it. It has nothing to do with your marketing efforts. If you want to protect your content, password protect your whole site with an .htpassword file. Google it, it is easy.

[SashaCorinne]

Hi Eterion-

When referring to a site being "live", it means it can be viewed by people if they type in your URL. Everytime you "publish" your site, all the changes you make, whether correct of not, can be viewed publicly. A site being "live" has nothing to do with the search engines you submit to, that just is necessary for your site to be crawled and ranked. If your site is not first live, the engines cannot reach it.

There must be a way for you to view your site without publishing it repeatedly. There should be a preview button if you are using site wizard. Every single design program has a view option.

As far as your concern about content being stolen, i wouldn't worry about that. You say that you want to get your site "known to the world" first. That may take quite a bit of time, and even then, the more popular it becomes the more likely someone is to steal from it. It is pretty safe to say that without submitting your site it is not likely to come up by anyone searching, but it is not impossible. I would submit your site asap, you WANT to get picked up by the search engines, dont let content stop you that's silly. Then work on finishing the site offline, and publish it once again near completion. This way you are already indexed and being crawled so when you add all this new content and pages, your numbers will shoot up.

[Eterion]

Sasha-
Ohmygosh, thats one of the best advice anyones ever given me... I was thinking of doing the same thing, but I needed like a boost somehow.
Im referring to how you said publish the URL to the search engines first, and then keep adding to the website, so that way, by the time im totally done, mypage is already indexed! Oh my gosh. thank you ALL (everyone else) so much for this advice!

[SashaCorinne]

LOL. Thank you! I'm glad i could help.

[GaryK]

Is it still true that using the Google Toolbar in advanced mode will send the URLs you visit back to Google which in turn will eventually spider the URLs?

[Eterion]

Hmm, if thats the case, I'm getting ALL my friends to use the Google Toolbar, visit every page on my site then move a long... :)
Can we get a confirmation on this?

[jetnovo]

This won't help your search engine rankings but will help protect your content;
If you can, why not just password-protect your site's root directory? Then all pages you publish online will be inaccessible to anyone without the password.
Once your site is ready to 'go live' (i.e. go public), just remove the password-protection.
I'm not really familiar with hosting packages outside of the two I use, hut your host should be able to provide you with instructions for adding the password-protection if you choose to run with it.

[oneguy]

If you can, why not just password-protect your site's root directory?

That's the solution.

Unless it's really a secret, I just put stuff out there while it's in progress - and hope it gets spidered.

You might also decide to put a little out there on the root directory, then develop in a password protected subdirectory.

[GaryK]

Can we get a confirmation on this?

Read the Toolbar TOS. :) It clearly states Google may collect information about web pages that you are viewing when the advanced functionality is enabled.

Also other threads here have confirmed a site can get spidered simply by visiting it with the toolbar in advanced mode. That's where it shows you the PR of the page amongst other things. In order to get the PR the toolbar has to send the URL to Google. Once Google has the URL about ten minutes later one of their spiders comes along and does a preliminary check of the site.