Question

if I take my website offline (eg. for an IIS7 site, I’m using the app_offline.htm file), then all requests goto my maintenance page.

But, Google (and other search engines) don’t ‘know’ that? they try to hit http://www.blahblah.com/whatever and it returns the maintenance page (and a 404 http status .. which IMO is BAD .. shouldn’t it be 50<something> SERVER UNAVAILABLE, but that’s another debate for another day… )

anyways … as the google bot is crawling my site .. and my site is offline … will that mean google thinks my site has bad pages/links/etc.. and as such … damages my google juice score/rating/magic stuff?

are there tricks to tell google bot ‘easy tiger! my site’s offline so be nice to me ’cause u’re not going to find anything to trawl’ .. ??

Answer 1

You should respond with a 503 Service Unavailable with a Retry-After header. See:

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-about-googlebot.html
• http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015171.html
• http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/handle-googlebot-during-site-downtime/