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Is there a HTTP status code to tell Google (and others) to go away, index me again later?
Basically, one that semantically tells clients that the site is down for maintenance?
The ones I have considered are
304 => Not modified 307 => Temporary redirect 410 => Gone 503 => Service Unavailable I'm leaning towards the last one, but was just curious as to which one was proper choice.
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The original definition of the 503 status code, according to this RFC, is: The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server.
The HTTP 204 No Content success status response code indicates that a request has succeeded, but that the client doesn't need to navigate away from its current page.
We tend to get -1 status codes when there are network issues or connection problems, so we display the user a network problems page in those cases.
2 201 Created. The request has been fulfilled and resulted in a new resource being created. The newly created resource can be referenced by the URI(s) returned in the entity of the response, with the most specific URI for the resource given by a Location header field.
HTTP 503 - Service Unavailable would be the most appropriate.
The Web server (running the Web site) is currently unable to handle the HTTP request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay.
This post on the Google Webmaster Central Forum is also relevant:
Yes - a 503 is the correct server response for "We're closed". If you substitute a normal HTML page saying "We're closed" and serve a 200 it's very likely to get indexed by Google.
If you give the Googlebot a 503, it will just go away and come back later without indexing what you give it.
UPDATE:
As for the php implementation, you may be interested in checking out the following article:
Also notice the retry-after header, where you can specify after how many seconds another request should be re-attempted.
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