URL Redirection for Coming Soon Page?

Question

I have a site with over 100 pages. We need to go live with products that are soon available, however, many site pages will not be prepared at the time of release.

In order to move forward, I would like to reference a "coming soon" page with links to pages that are current and available.

Is there an easy way to forward a URL to a Coming Soon page? Is this valid, or is there a better way?

Found this at: http://www.web-source.net/html_redirect.htm

"Place the following HTML redirect code between the and tags of your HTML code.

   meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html"

Does this negatively affect you if the search engines crawl through your site?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Perhaps a better or "more correct way" would be to do the redirection at the header level. Using PHP, you would call

<?php
header("Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html");

There's also ways to do this in Apache (assuming you are using it) and .htaccess-files. See http://www.webweaver.nu/html-tips/web-redirection.shtml for more info about that.

Answer 2

The code you listed will work. However, I would never do this:

1. You could just show the page you wanted to show immediately, without a redirect. This will be faster for the visitor, as they don't need to load two pages.
2. If you must use a redirect, why not create it programmatically, for example by instructing your web server (e.g. Apache) to redirect certain pages?
3. I would not link to pages that don't exist yet. Most visitors will dislike that - clicking on something to find out "come back later" is a disappointment. We've all seen those coming soon pages, with the content never arriving, or only after months or even years. Either leave out those links (or perhaps put a "work in progress sign" without a link), or add the items only after they've been finished.

Search engines should work well with redirect pages, although it is unlikely your "coming soon" page will show up anywhere in the top the rankings anyway.