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May 20, 2009 Bookmark and Share

When a 'new website coming soon' page isn't a good idea

So your website is looking long in the tooth. You've rebranded your company since the website went live all those years ago and the text content is out of date and/or not professionally written. You might even hate the sight of your site! It's time for a refresh. You commission a new site to be designed and built. It's better to have no website than a bad website (right?) so your natural instinct during the re-development phase is pull the whole site down and replace it with bright and breezy 'new site coming soon' 1-pager. But this might not be such a great idea...

As much as you might dislike your old site, here's the challenge: Google doesn't. Google has no concept of whether your old site looks good, bad, or ugly. Google also doesn't know or care whether the content is up-to-date, or especially eloquent. The core of what Google cares about is visible (i.e. publically accessible, no password required) text content. So unless your business direction has changed massively since the website was last updated (i.e. you used to sell bananas and now you're a funeral director) there's a very high chance that the old site's text content remains broadly representative of your company today.

So what happens if you pull the old site down and replace it with a 'new site coming soon' page whilst waiting for the new site to go live? Answer: when your site is revisited ("re-indexed") by Google, the search engine ranking of your website, i.e. the findability of your business in Google, heads south. All Google has to work with now in terms of ranking your site is a 1 page website with a tiny bit of text. Sure, when the new website goes live, your rankings should start to climb back up over time (or much more quickly if you employ our sister company www.bangonline.com.au) but why take the hit in the first place if you don't have to?

Confession time: historically we (Itomic) haven't fully considered the likely short-term negative impact of this effect, and have been only too happy to oblige when asked by a client to pull the old site down and replace it with a temporary 1-pager.

We operate in a fast-paced industry, and learning and re-learning is part of the job description and what helps to makes our jobs more interesting! But the next time a client asks us to replace their old site with a "coming soon" 1-pager we'll be sure to educate them first that it's a better idea to stick with their old site just a little bit longer. Unless of course they dislike the old site so much that they're prepared to take a hit in the search engines, or being found in Google was never such a big deal for their business model in the first place.

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