Are You Website Changes Not Being Cached?

It can happen quite often. New website is published, taking down the 'in progress' sign, and you look at the Google cache of your site a week later, 2 weeks later, a month later....

But you are disappointed. The cache is still not the new site - it's still saying the site is under construction and all that hard work is going to waste!

This happens quite a lot. A customer registers their URL then comes to us some time later for a site. We publish the site and a month later we're still trying hard to get Google to visit. The owner of Empowering Confidence asked me why this is the case today, and this is her situation.

Basically, search engines visit your site when they first discover it. They come back a short while later and go over it again. If all they find is an 'In Progress' sign and no changes, then they will leave it longer before they next visit. And then longer, then longer, then longer as with every visit they find a site with little text and no changes.

They just lose interest in you. That's what has happened to Empowering Confidence and Google hasn't visited for almost 2 months, so now I have to persuade Google to visit the site. And that's not easy. It's far easier for me to work with a brand new URL than an existing one!

So what can you do if you desperately want to protect your preferred URL but aren't ready to build a site? Well, for a start, save yourself the hosting fees and just go for the email package. Why put up an 'in progress' sign? Is that going to get you more customers than no site? If you really do want to put up an in progress sign, then use the robots.txt file to ban all search engines from your site. As soon as the site goes live that file can be changed and then search engines will be all over it.