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So my SEO “circles” are buzzing today on Google+ with a post from Googler Pierre Far on how to take your site down for a short period of time while minimizing any negative impact that might have on your site’s rankings. The timing of this post was due to the “planned outages” of websites supporting SOPA blackout but it still brings up an important point. If you know your site is going to be unavailable, Google wants you to notify them!
The most common HTTP status code SEO’s like to talk about is 301. A 301 status code is known as a permanent redirect. When traffic hits the web server and the header returns 301, the 301 is accompanied by where the requested content has been moved to. This is important to SEO’s because when you move content around that had good rankings and value, you should really tell Google where to look for that content to avoid any drop in rankings. It’s important to keep Google informed.
A 503 status code is saying “Service Temporarily Unavailable”. The reasons why your website is unavailable is not important. It could be due to website maintenance, traffic overload, or maybe a protest like the SOPA blackout. What is important here is that the server is answering a request with a valid status code. Google will look at this and understand that as of “right now” the website should not be considered fully operational. Google will then stop indexing that site for as long as it’s receiving the 503 status code (thus avoiding duplicate content issues if for some reason all of your url content is replaced with “website is down” instead of forwarding to a 503 page).
Don’t forget that 503 is supposed to be a temporary code. If you have any reason to keep your site down for longer then there might not be a satisfactory solution to hold onto your rankings. Google is only going to rank working websites in its search results. For more information and tips on dealing with your planned site downtime you can look to Google’s webmaster blog.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html
