How to Serve a Search Friendly Maintenance Page
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008When your website is down for maintenance or other outages, what should you return to search engine spiders that try to crawl your site? Returning a “maintenance page” could cause problems if they take your maintenance page content and put that in the index. You may suddenly lose all your rankings you worked hard to achieve. Of course, when the search engines come back, they will find your actual content again, but your SEO rankings and traffic will suffer in the mean time.
There are lots of “wrong” ways to handle maintenance mode. These include:
- Return a maintenance message using an HTTP 200 response code (gives the search engines new content for the page, which they may try to index, messing up your search rankings).
- Returning a 404 Not Found error (tells the search engine your page is gone — good by indexing!).
- Don’t respond at all (indicates your site is down — bad for users, but also tells search engines your site is unreliable and deserves less trust). Of course, if your server or network are hard down, this is what will happen anyway, but if you can try to avoid this.
- Return a redirect to other content, whether 301, 302, JavaScript or meta refresh (confuses the search engine as to what the real content is, just like a maintenance page using a 200 response code).
So, what is the best response to return when your site is in maintenance mode?
You should use an HTTP 503 “Service Unavailable” response for all pages that cannot be served in their normal mode. This tells the search engines to ignore this response, keep the current cache and indexing they have for that page, and come back later for a fresh copy.
Note that it is important to serve this response for all pages that are unavailable.
A PHP example of an HTTP 503 response is as follows:
<?php
header (’HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable’);
?>
<html><head>
<title>Our website is temporarily unavailable</title>
</head><body>
Our apologies, our website is temporarily unavailable. Please return in a few minutes.
<p>
Thank you!
</body></html>
By using the HTTP 503 “Service Unavailable” response code, you can avoid all sorts of issues with search engines reacting the wrong way, and preserve your SEO rankings over site outages.
John Erickson
www.leadqual.com
