About Your Pre-Production Site
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When you get a new site on Stanford Sites, the site is considered "pre-production" until the site has been launched.
When you first get your site, your site will have:
- An unpublished homepage. This will prevent crawlers from easily finding your site. You can still create other published pages for review or use the Site Reviewer role to share unpublished pages with reviewers.
- "sites" in the URL. This is a provisional URL that you can use during review, but it should never be circulated as the final URL.
- Noindex set to block search traffic. This will keep your site pages from being indexed by Google, Bing, and others until you are ready to share your site with the world.
- Coming soon: In a future release, your site will have banner that indicates the site is "under construction." If someone comes across one of your pages, it will be clear that this site is not an official or complete site.
When we launch the site, the following changes are made:
- Publish the homepage
- Add a three- or four-part domain
- Add the site in Siteimprove
- Unblock search engines, unless continued blocking is requested during the launch
Related topics
Launch your site
Learn how prepare for launch and how to launch your Stanford Site.
Block Search Engines
All sites on Stanford Sites are open to search engines upon provisioning.