What is a website holding page?
Coming soon content pages (or website holding pages for short) seem to be the norm when launching a fresh website. Developers rely on them to build a newsletter before the website is even published, and they alert users that new content is coming on the web.
Yes, it’s all great, but people fail to realise that there are some serious downsides to launching a domain as a coming soon page featuring little to no content.
If you launch your website as a holding page with no content, your site won’t rank in search engines because you won’t have any links, and you won’t get any organic traffic.
These are the reasons why introducing a coming soon page is a terrible, terrible idea.
Check out this guide to local seo
The Google gods hate coming soon content pages
Imagine you are a construction company who just received the projects to build a whole skyscraper. You dig, purchase the material, and just as you finish building the foundations you place a bomb on one of the pillars and set it off, making sure it’s as destructive as possible.
This is exactly what landing pages do to your SEO: Google worships content above anything else, and once those tiny little crawlers dig through your website and find no value registered under your domain, they will reject it entirely, and down your website goes through the rankings.
But what if you had a highly trafficked content and you want to publish it as a coming soon page in anticipation for a new, prettier site?
That is somewhat even worse: The Google gods remain unmerciful, and as those crawlers discover that your previously content-rich website is now just a blank website holding page, you will be penalised and have to start from the bottom of the ranking all over again.
In other words, coming soon page = bad
Traffic is great, but you have got to have good road surface
Chances are, there are a million websites similar to yours that offer content similar to yours. When someone searches for a cake recipe, they will find hundreds of thousands of results, and when all they are presented with is a “Website coming soon!” rather than a delicious cake, they will not come back to your website.
They grow frustrated and they make sure to never visit your website again. Sure, a developer might be excited to see all that traffic on a coming soon page… But at the same time, you are making sure that traffic won’t come down your road ever again.
While your old site might be unattractive or simply awful to use, putting up this page is even worse. While your old site might be terrible it could still hold value, still allows your users to read a little about your or find your phone number etc.
But when users are instead dumped in front of a single page with just the words “Website coming soon!”, they grow frustrated. While those words may excite you, they certainly do not elicit the same feelings from your potential client.
Conclusion
So are landing pages bad for seo? No! Don’t do website holding page or coming soon content pages. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to get in touch
Pro Tip: Remove old content from google
Why not find out what Google loves about your website and take our free SEO audit over on our Search engine optimisation page
Are coming soon pages bad for SEO?
It is not recommended to use coming soon pages for SEO purposes, as these pages are generally excluded from search engine results. The content on the page may also be seen as irrelevant by search engine algorithms and could hurt your rankings.
what is the purpose of a coming soon page?
The purpose of a coming soon page is to give users an idea of what is to come and to inform them when the page or website is up and running. It also helps to build anticipation and create hype around an upcoming product or service.