Hi
I don't know the official terms for what this is called, but would greatly appreciate any advice.
The scenario is as follows: I have an index.html page on my domain to serve as a 'Under Construction' page, while I develop the website behind that using Drupal on an index.php page.
Is there any way in which I can have Google index the links on index.php so long while I develop it or is this a stupid way of doing things?
Thanks in advance.
You can check the user-agent string in PHP, for example this code check for GoogleBot. Search for "Detect GoogleBot" for more similar scripts.
This could be against Google's standards and could result in your site being removed from Google's listings - providing one type of content to users, and another to Google's Spider.
It could be done using .htaccess re-writes though
Use a sitemap.xml submitted at Google Webmaster Tools?
The other thing I'd consider would be a 302 redirect from the index.html to index.php. You'd have to be careful about how you go about it though - previous commenters are correct in their concerns...
I would be very hesitant to serve up different pages to Google than to a regular visitor. While details are sketchy due to Google's secrecy, your site may be penalised in Google's search engine.
Besides, if the pages those links go to don't have useful content on them yet, you are unlikely to get much benefit from any of the major search engines. And if you did have the content already, you may as well just put it online (soft launch).
As you can see from the other answers, you can look at the user agent and give different content, but you shouldn't, Google doesn't like that.
What you can try is to add a sitemap with the links you want to index (check the link for more info)