I am pretty much opened to any way of doing this.

While working on my website, I only want certain IPs to be able to access it. All other IPs I want redirected to a "Coming Soon" page.

I know that it can be done by denying IPs in htaccess but that would redirect them to the 403 page - which I could of course customize. However, that is not what I am really trying to do because then search engines will recognize the error page and not index the site...

Any help would be appreciated.

search engines will recognize the error page

No they won't, the crawler will get the 403 response and leave.

Yea, that's what I meant by that. They get the error and never even consider indexing the website.

Is there is way to do a 301 redirect but not have it effect certain IP addresses?

Use robots.txt so they never actually index the site until they are allowed.
and
Don't start building links until the site is ready.

Why allow crawlers into a site where the pages are unfinished? Because that's what you will be stuck with in the index for several months!

Originally Posted by CyberWizard

Is there is way to do a 301 redirect but not have it effect certain IP addresses?

Yes, in Apache, probably in others. See ALLOW and DENY directives.

Don't publish it, you still be able to get it by IP, account name.
Nobody would be able to access it by domain name.
It will not exist officially.
You will be free to launch it anytime you wish.

Don't publish it, you still be able to get it by IP, account name.

And if you are NOT on shared hosting?

Why not?
It can be accessed on shared hosting as well.
Which will be something like IP+~accountname, isn't it?