Certain buildings are undeniably beautiful.  Others are at least interesting to look at, and pretty much everything is better than what the average person could construct on his or her own.  The piles of building supplies that once existed weren’t so nice, though, and it’s important that you keep search engines from seeing your site in a similar condition.

We’ll start with what came as a response to a longer article.  Jaan Kanellis wrote, “Why not work within a dev environment and then push changes live?  Your website should NEVER be down during changes and updates.”  This is a reasonable approach, and no one’s recommending that you do otherwise.

However, if you for some reason want or need to perform some more public renovations, Ann Smarty offered a couple of good tips.

“Don’t show [an] ‘under construction’ notice to search bots,” she began.  “[B]y this you risk wasting your chance getting indexed properly on the spot and you will have to work much more to get them come back and change their opinion about your site.”

Also, “It might be wise to put a holding page to update your casual visitors of your upcoming site status but let it return 503 header status-code to invite crawlers return later.”

An update is a risky thing - you’re betting that the finished product will be in every way equal to or better than the original.  But it would be a pity to lose ground before that revision even launches, so follow the advice of either Kanellis or Smarty if at all possible.

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