Best way to display maintenence mode on a website?
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I have a website with lots of traffic and sometimes the backends fail. I want to use lighttpd to show that the website is under mantenence and should be back up shortly.
I was thinking of using Soft 503 errors or doing a 302 for every page to /maintenance.html.
What would you do (besides fixing the backends, we are already doing that :P) to avoid hurting your SEO efforts?
Thanks in advance
Mariano
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The Google Webmaster Central blog advises to use a 503 for planned downtown (and bandwidth-overruns) in their January 2011 post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html.
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I asked this question to Jane Copeland a few months ago and her answer was to return a 503 error code, which sends a signal that your site is temporarily unavailable to the search engines.
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