Under Construction pages on websites – do they matter to SEO?

We’ve talked about the need to ensure that your website does not have duplicate content, meta descriptions or title tags but what about “under construction” pages?

Well, from a users point of view these pages are frustrating and could lead to you losing more visitors than you would normally as they try to get information from your site but on following a link get “under construction”.  Google mention this in their Local Listing Guidelines and recommend that pages with no content on them should be excluded using a robots.txt file if you are unable to avoid publishing these pages.

From a search engine point of view “under construction” tells the spider nothing about a website’s content.  With the SEO work you are doing on your website one of the focuses is to prove to Google the relevancy of your website against a benchmark set of keywords and all the pages on your website help to do this.  So those “under construction” pages should be avoided where possible.

When you have a new idea for a section on your site make sure that the content of this section is complete before sending the page live and if you need to change all of the content on a page make sure you are able to populate this page before you try and make the changes as putting a holding page with “under construction” up on the site.

Another impact of changing a page with content to an under construction message could be the loss of rankings.  Google and the other search engines may well have placed a high level of importance on the page you are thinking of changing, including a site link, or a high place ranking for the page.  If you remove all the copy and just replace this with “under construction” then this page could lose rankings causing a drop in visits to your site.