Comments on: How to handle Googlebot during site downtime

By: stefan

stefan — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 23:38:46 +0000

I have changed soon my server, and the site was down for few hours and 2-3 day the site speed was low.And now everything is ok with the site is online with good speed loading. BUT the traffic is down with 1k.

I dont know why

By: How to manage the website of a company in administration

How to manage the website of a company in administration — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:59:04 +0000

[...] 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable HTTP status code in the same way as you would if your site was undergoing temporary downtime. The example below tells Googlebot to retry after a week.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:34:53 +0000

I have always used the rewrite rule and holding page trick but it has never occurred to me to use a 503 header to really send the right message.

Apache will also send a 503 response when it reaches max_clients. It’s good to know that this won’t affect Google.

I’ve always wanted to use 410 Gone but I have never found the right time to use it. If I ever move content then I know where it is and send a 301 response… I don’t ever just delete something.

By: FileGets

FileGets — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:48:38 +0000

Nice tip! Very nice! I’ll save it.
But unfortunately this can’t solve problem then your host goes down and you can’t access it…

By: Anthony Williams

Anthony Williams — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:43:56 +0000

Nice tip. So many websites return the wrong HTTP codes, especially when the pages are generated through a CMS. 503 is definitely much better than 404 — it says “come back later” rather than screaming “ERROR!!! BAD LINK!!!”.

This is not just good for Google, it’s good for visitors too, especially if you’ve written a decent explanation in the errorpage.

By: andy

andy — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 20:21:21 +0000

Nice tip here. Thanks a lot. I had never thought about doing individual page downtime messages programatically. Nice work!