"Will gaining links to a domain that has no content on it hurt your search ranking?"

You have a brilliant idea and need a website. Despite not having any content ready for the website, you buy the domain anyway. And now you're set. You're ready to go. Getting a design mocked up and coded, marketing the domain and getting links, doing all of your SEO and a bit of SEM and your website will be a huge success.

But you're impatient (like 99% of all of us). You want to start building your website's reputation by getting links immediately. So you market a bit, advertise a bit, trade links a bit, whatever you consider SEO, before you get the website up.

Will gaining links to a domain that has no content on it hurt your search ranking? How does a search engine treat a new domain that has zero content on at one time and then just a few days later have great, quality content on it?

Well, it turns out that linking to a parked or "non-furnished" domain DOES hurt your search engine ranking.

When search engines see a link pointing to a domain, they follow that link. The content that resides at that link is indexed immediately (with a few exceptions), cached, and marked as a new website.

Now, say, a few days later you get your content up and now you're really ready to rock and roll. Only problem is: the search engines are not going to see your new content for a while. In-fact: the search engines figure you're not worth checking and indexing and caching again so soon because you're new to the game. So they keep the old content (if any was there) and leave it at that.

While you wait for your new content to get indexed you are losing valuable search customers. People searching for your content are not going to find it, because you got a little excited and took a false start.

It's like a race in the Olympics, if you jump or step or leap or dive away from that starting line before everybody is ready for you... you're disqualified.