Forum Moderators: phranque
I am re-developing one of my websites, and will be creating many more pages of content over the coming months. I won't be launching the new look site for a few months, until it is completely ready.
However I have been thinking recently about the structure and what to call the URL's, making them SEO freindly, etc. I was wondering what other webmasters do in this situation. Do you create the pages and put a little content, and link from your main site, to get the pages crawled by the search engines, or do you just wait until everything it ready?
I don't really want the content I'm producing to be read by humans until it is ready, as much of it is different from the rest of the site, and it all needs to be read in it's context of the new look site. Plus there is nothing worse than 'under construction' or 'coming soon'.
But the advantage of creating the pages would be that when the proper content is ready, the pages will be picked up quicker by the search engines.
What do you think?
Quite right; it's your problem, not the visitor's!
Personally, I'd set up the major 'section indexes', if I could do it without it being confusing for visitors, and wherever possible, I'd use the same folder names for new sections (you could even change some existing ones slightly over the weeks).
But however excited you may be over the relaunch, that can never justify wrecking the current site, so you need to take care :)
The major issue, however, is preparing for the change itself. You'll need to be prepared to set up many 301s, forwarding visitors from the old to the best equivalent of the new.
Finally, do look at the big picture - is it at all possible to launch any of the new areas over a period of weeks? While there may be some disadvantages, there is the advantage of a wave of new stuff - but the much bigger advantage of not changing the whole site in one go - which is ALWAYS a major risk for the SEs, which may decide to reduce the site to a new / sandbox site / callitwhatyouwill thedamagemaybedone site.
Successive launches by section will allow each new bit to be assimilated by the SEs, reducing a small risk to a very small risk.
