Google’s John Mueller offered a useful for technical SEO tip for those launching a new site that will help your site get picked up by Google faster by avoiding this one common mistake.
High Priority For Site Launch
Launching a website is a chance to take everything learned from previous experiences and apply them with the benefit of hindsight. There’s no better teacher for success than failure because lessons learned from mistakes are never forgotten.
Someone who recently registered a new domain started a discussion on Reddit asking what were the top three considerations for launching a successful website before anything else has been done. The person asking the question preemptively ruled out the obvious answer of adding the domain to Google Search Console and set the ground rule that the niche or type of business didn’t matter. What did matter is that the suggestions must be important for scaling traffic within the first six month of the website.
They asked:
“Let’s say you have a brand new domain and you’ve been given a task to build traffic in the next 6 months. The niche, business does not matter, and the basics like ‘adding domain to Google search console’ don’t matter.
Tell me what are the first 3, high-priority things you’ll implement.”
The Most Upvoted Answer
It’s somewhat surprising that the most upvoted answer, with 83 votes, was one that offered the most obvious suggestions.
The top upvoted answer was:
“Create landing pages/content for your lowest funnel keyword opportunities and work the the way up.”
It’s a matter of course that the information architecture of the site should be planned out ahead of time (things like keywords, topics, key pages, a complete org-chart style map of categories with room left for expanding topical coverage, and an interlinking strategy). The upvoted answer is absolutely correct but it’s also fairly obvious.
The rest of that highly upvoted response:
“Claim brand on top social medias.
Build easiest citations and directories that I know get indexed. Plus niche relevant ones.
Start reactive digital PR as main initial link building campaign.”
The obviousness of that upvoted answer is in contrast with the not so obvious quality of Mueller’s response.
Related: How to Launch a New Website: A Complete Guide
John Mueller Advice On SEO Preparation
John Mueller’s advice is excellent and offers an insight into a technical issue that is easy to overlook.
He wrote:
“Just throwing this out there – if you don’t have a site ready, either keep DNS disabled or put up a custom holding page. Don’t use a generic server / CMS holding page. It generally takes longer for a site that’s known to be parked / duplicate to get recognized as a normal site than it does for a site to be initially picked up.”
Keep DNS Disabled
DNS stands for Domain Name System and is a reference to the backend process of converting a domain name to the IP address where the actual content exists. All content exists at an IP address, not at the domain name. The domain name just points to where the content is. By keeping DNS disabled what happens is that Google doesn’t discover the domain pointing to anything so it essentially doesn’t exist.
See also: Google: Don’t Choose Cheap TLDs, Avoid Spam Risks
Don’t Use Generic Server/CMS Holding Page
A generic server holding page is the same as a parked domain, it’s like a false signal to Google that something exists at the IP address that a domain name resolves to.
The effect of Mueller’s advice regarding disabling a DNS and not using a generic holding page is to keep the domain name from resolving to a holding page (assuming that a registrar’s holding page is also turned off). This keeps Google from sniffing out the domain and finding a generic “nothing here” holding page.
Mueller’s advice points to the technical issue that Google will recognize and index a site faster if a generic version is never activated and the domain name essentially doesn’t exist.
So if you want your website to be picked up and indexed quickly then it’s best to not use a generic domain holding page.
Read Mueller’s advice here:
Brand New Domain : What are the first 3 things you’ll do?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero