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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T08:25:51+00:00

If you have to take a site down for some type of unavoidable maintenance

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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:

  • 503 Service Unavailable
  • 500 Internal Server Error
  • 408 Timeout
  • 404 Not Found

I think 503 is the most appropriate, but I don’t know what search engines might prefer.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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.

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