Menu
If you have to take a site down for some type of unavoidable maintenance task (and it's not a big enough site that you have a backup server), what HTTP status code should you have your server return to minimize the possibility that search engines will think the site is gone?
I found this list of status codes from W3C, of which the following seem applicable:
I think 503 is the most appropriate, but I don't know what search engines might prefer.
769
Perhaps the most common status code returned is 200. It simply means that the request was received, understood, and is being processed, whereas the 201 status code indicates that a request was successful and a resource was created as a result.
2xx codes are success codes. 3xx redirection codes are redirects. 4xx are any codes that fail to load on the client side, or client error codes. 5xx are any codes that fail to load due to a server error.
An HTTP status code is a server response to a browser's request. When you visit a website, your browser sends a request to the site's server, and the server then responds to the browser's request with a three-digit code: the HTTP status code.
304 Not Modified This HTTP 304 status code is not well known, but it offers the possibility to save crawl budget. The Google bot will use the cached version and instantly access the requested page. Consequences for your SEO: The page is not crawled again which avoids the consumption of resources and crawl budget.
From the horse's mouth:
If my site is down for maintenance, how can I tell Googlebot to come back later rather than to index the "down for maintenance" page?
You should configure your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) rather than 200 (successful). That lets Googlebot know to try the pages again later.
176
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
