Google Bots

Pádraig · Jun 29th, 2007, 15:22

I just set up a new website, and I want to get it SEO'ed to the max..lol.

I was wondering, does google index websites that have no files uploaded? Because I don't want Google to index my site with an "Under Construction" page up, or will that effect my search results?

Thanks,
Pádraig.

spinal007 · Jun 29th, 2007, 18:35

Erm... Google crawls the web. If your site is not on the web (on something like http://www.yoursite.com/) then it won't be indexed.

Otherwise, Google will index it if and when...
a) it finds a link to your site somewhere on the web
or
b) if you ask Google to.

But you website's indexing still depends on your robots.txt file, in which you can ask spiders not to index certain pages/sections of your site.

That's as complete an answer as I can give...

VanessaJW · Jun 29th, 2007, 18:57

Also I was told that if you don't want Google or anybody else to index your site, or a particular page, then you should put:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

Into your <head> tags

Is that right somebody, oui ou non?

spinal007 · Jun 29th, 2007, 19:08

That's right, but you should only use a meta tag when you can't use robots.txt.

Also, it's worth noting that the robots.txt convention is a mere guideline to robots & spiders. There's no guarantee all robots who find your site will respect the rules within the file.

Pádraig · Jun 29th, 2007, 21:09

Okay. Thanks for the replies.

If you to this site http://marcfraser.co.uk, you will see that there are no files uploaded yet. Does that mean that google will not index it?

spinal007 · Jun 29th, 2007, 23:09

No. Google won't bother indexing that.
There are no links to itm you haven't specifically asked to have it indexed, it has no valuable content.