Using robot.txt exclusion on "placeholder" pages

[Guillam]

I own several domains I'm planning to develop in the next 3-6 months. I understand that parking a domain can sometimes hurt its later search engine ranking, so I've temporarily put up placeholder pages ("This page is under construction") while I'm working on fleshing out the websites off-line.

My question is: since I'm not ready to go live, is it better to put up a Robots.txt file to prevent the bots from indexing my "placeholder" page, or will using the robots exclusion now hurt my search engine rankings later on?

Thanks. I hope everyone had a great New Years!

 

[Peter]

Using a robots now will not hurt future rankings at all.

Most (if not all) search engines download the robots text on a regular basis to ensure they are not downloading pages they shouldn't.

What you could do to help the process when the sites do go live is to provide Google, Yahoo, MSN etc with an xml sitemap so they are immediately aware of pages that are active. This will push them to browse and index your site.

 

[Guillam]

Thanks Peter.

 

[dman_2007]

I don't think using either of these options will have any effect on your upcoming site's ranking in SERPs.