I am in the process of hosting my site with a hosting service provider but the content for the site is not yet ready. So, I am planning to put it behind Apache auth and then, when I am ready to open it for the public remove the authentication. My question, is will this affect SEO in any way or prevent google from indexing the site in the future once it is open to public? I am sure this is a common situation for many sites and how does one deal with it?
+1
A:
My question, is will this affect SEO in any way or prevent google from indexing the site in the future once it is open to public?
If your site is already indexed with Google, and you put it under password protection, it is possible, even likely, that the Google Bot will recognize this, and remove your content from its index. The bot will re-index the pages once they are accessible again, but this may take some time, and you may take a hit in rankings.
If the site is not yet indexed, I don't see how a temporary password protection could affect indexing/SEO in the future.
Pekka
2010-08-31 06:40:52
Nope. The site is not already indexed.
Ramos
2010-08-31 07:05:44
+1
A:
Yes, in SEO time is an important factor.
Publish a temporary website with some of your content today, and work on your final website in a protected sub directory called "final" that you exclude in your robot.txt file just in case.
This will allow early referencing and indexing while you are working.
Pierre 303
2010-08-31 07:13:17
Thanks for that. I understand that time is an important factor. But I am not really worried about the time part here. What I want to know is that say I do not password protected the site and I am at SEO "level 1" in 2 weeks(using some metric for better explanation). Now I password protect the file and later make it publicly accessible. I am ok if it takes 3 weeks to reach SEO "level 1". What I want to know is that will making my site password protected will prevent it from ever reaching SEO "level 1"?
Ramos
2010-08-31 07:40:37
No, but only accessible pages will be indexed, and the protected pages will be removed from the indexes.
Pierre 303
2010-08-31 07:54:55