Temporarily shut down a site

[LibertyTax]

What would be the best way to temporarily shut down a site the right way and not have a negative impact on SEO?

[KeriMorgret]

I asked the Q&A associates their opinion, and several people also responded that a 503 would be the way to go.

[LibertyTax]

It is due to some legal matter. So we need it to shut it down

[KeriMorgret]

Can you give us some more details about the shutdown (the reasons, why it needs to be so long, etc)? We can help you a bit better if we know more information.

When we switched from SEOmoz.org to moz.com, we were only down for half an hour, if that. If this is about upgrading, is there a testing server that you can use to get the website rebuilt and tested on the testing/staging server before you make it live? We used multiple staging servers to test out the site and did lots of checks so that we had minimal downtime when it came time to move the site.

[LibertyTax]

What if it is more than a week?

[KeriMorgret]

I'm also assuming that you're talking about just a day or two, and not two months. There was a post on Moz last year about this that can also help, in addition to the good info provided by CleverPhD http://moz.com/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance

[CleverPhD]

Appreciate the positive comment EGOL!

[EGOL]

That was a great answer.  Thanks.  I didn't know that.

[CleverPhD]

Thank you - please mark my response as Good Answer if it helps.

Cheers!

[LibertyTax]

Thank you

[CleverPhD]

According to Matt Cutts

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2281151/Matt-Cutts-Short-Website-Downtime-Wont-Hurt-Your-Search-Rankings

"According to Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts if your website is down just for a day, such as your host being down or a server transfer, there shouldn't be any negative impact to your search rankings. However, if the downtime is extended, such as for two weeks, it could have impact on your search rankings because Google doesn't necessarily want to send the user to a website that they know has been down, because it provides the user with a poor user experience.

Google does make allowances for websites that are sporadically having downtime, so Googlebot will visit again 24 hours later so and see if the site is accessible."

That said, what should you show Google?

http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/

According to Yoast, you should not show a 200 (ok) or 404 (file not found), but a 503 code on all pages with a retry-after header to Google.

The 503 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html) tells Google "The server is currently unable to handle the 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. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.:

The retry after tells Google when to come back.  You should set this to a time that is generous to allow you plenty of time to get everything back up and running.

Another point from Yoast that he links to https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/Gas8vjZ5fmB - if the robots.txt file shows a 503 then Google will stop wasting time crawling all your pages (and wasting time) until it sees a 200 back on your robots.txt file.  So it is key that you get the 503 and retry after properly on the robots.txt

Cheers!