Changing minisite to holding page

bensd · Sep 5, 2013

I'm helping a family member with her website.

2 years ago I helped her acquire a brandable domain which I put a 15 page minisite on it (to get it indexed) until she was ready.

The business has taken a slight change in direction so the content is no longer relevant.

In 2-3 months a full ecommerce site will go live however, she would like me to change the site to a holding page with the new logo.

What affect will this have on the new site? Should I leave a link live on the holding page to the minisite content and then delete it once the full site is live?

bensd · Sep 7, 2013

Anyone available to offer any advice on this?

tifosi · Sep 7, 2013

Seem to remember Matt Cutts recommendation fairly recently where he said that if a domain had a new purpose (or is new) then putting up a simple one page site that is easily crawlable is the best route. And to do that a few weeks / months before use.

I'd use a very basic html5 template with the doctype and upto date semantic html with a simple paragraph stating it's intended purpose. Make sure the paragraph is 'readable' english with no keyword stuffing. Just 50-100 words.

No need to resubmit, google will reindex it in a few days at most. Of course 'link juice' would be lost but if the site is going off at a tangent it may be the right thing to do in the long term. Google have a thing about context thesedays.

It's what I've done.