Hi B set,

Never put "under construction" on your site if you can help it. This will send a message to the SE spiders to go away and not come back for a long while.

What you can do is put up a simple page that describes what your site is about. Add two or three paragraphs at a minimum. This will give the spiders a little bit of food and encourage them to come back.

If possible add a little bit more content every few days. This will keep the spiders coming back until you get your full site up.

As mentioned above "Under Construction" is a death knell ... I'd also mention that submitting your sites to search engines is a waste of energy, but opinions on that vary.

Because I work multiple projects, sometimes dozens under dev at once, I might pick up a domain or partially-finished site today knowing fully well that it will be months before I get the opportunity to focus on it. In such cases I will spend an hour or two putting together a largely automatic site using WP or another CMS platform with feed-driven content. This is by no means an ideal way to get a site up mind you, but it puts out something a bit better to site visitor than a parking page, and can get multiple pages indexed and ranked while I'm busy working on other things.

If you go that route, be sure to code up a custom 404 page for when you take down the "placeholder" site -- otherwise you'll lose any benefit to the older pages being indexed.

An advanced tip is to have the "placeholder" removed from the Wayback and other similar cache services (but not from those of Google and the other major search engines, since this will remove your indexed links fro the SERPs.)


Frank