Effects of a long-term holding page/503 http code whilst site is being rebranded?
-
We have a client who is adamant that during the rebranding of their company and website, a holding page is put in place from August 5<sup>th</sup> till go-live date on August 21<sup>st</sup>.
They don’t look like budging on the matter, therefore we are looking to set up a 503 HTTP code on the holding page to tell Google the site is down for maintenance and redirect all pages back to the holding page.
The general consensus is that implementing this for such a long period of time will see Google de-index all pages and the site will lose masses of traffic as a result for a substantial time afterwards.
It would be great to get some insight on best practice for this situation, how Google will determine the situation and the consequences of such actions.
If you have any case studies of similar situations or have firm knowledge of how this scenario would affect the site, I would be delighted to hear from you!
-
Hi Matt,
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that sounds like a pretty successful implementation to me - it makes total sense to me that Google would temporarily de-index your site if it was returning a 503; after all, there was nowhere for a user to go. The fact that you've been able to gain back your rankings afterward means that Google understood what was going on and didn't ding you for having a "broken" site, which is what the goal of this process should be.
Perhaps I'm not understanding your goals? If you want the holding/home page to stay indexed, then yes, a 200 response code is what that page should be returning - Google tries not to send traffic to pages consistently returning a 503. In your original question it sounded like you wanted to let Google know that the site was down for maintenance, but would return, in which case a 503 is really your best bet.
-
We found some negative effects of implementing the above, unfortunately.
Our process was:
- Implement the holding page and place a 503 HTTP status into the header for the page, along with a come back later date when the site would be live again.
- 302 every other page to the homepage (holding page).
- The Robots was removed in this process.
- Found that the homepage had been de-indexed - reinstated the Robots file with no disallow restrictions.
- Still couldn't raise the site through branded search terms and returned the homepage back to a 200, indexed the page again in WMT and used social media to boost this process.
- The homepage is now showing where it was before on the first page for branded terms.
We feel we didn't do anything wrong and wondered if anyone had any ideas if there were any errors in our process?
Cheers,
Matt.
-
Hi Ruth,
Thanks for the response. The multiple 302 in combination with a 503 seems like the best way to go. I'll check out the yoast post, hadn't thought about adding a 503 to the robots.txt as well.
Matt
-
Hi Matt,
I think setting up a 503 HTTP code on the holding page and then using 302 redirects to point all pages to that page is a viable option. You could also consider having every page return a 503 error (make sure your robots.txt page does, as that will keep the search engines from continuing to crawl). The pages on the site will most likely fall out of the index while you're returning a 503, but that's OK since there won't be anything for your users to find anyway.
The key here is to add a Retry-After header with the GMT date and time your site will be available. That lets Google know when to come back and that the site isn't actually down/returning a 503 forever. Yoast has a great post on this at http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/ which I'd recommend checking out.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does a site with only one blog post a month rank alright?
I manage multiple websites and want to start new ones but want to know if one blog post a month is acceptable for SEO since I'm worried about rank.
Branding | | hssm20191 -
How do I improve the ranking of a site, which already receives huge volumes of traffic?
I have taken over the SEO campaign for one of our largest clients. They already receive over a million visits a year due to the brand itself. However, I'd like to start targeting some new search terms to diversify the incoming visitors. Any advice on this type of situation, beyond traditional SEO best practices? Thanks in advance!
Branding | | underscorelive0 -
Tips on building buzz and getting traffic for new sites
I have an idea for a new "socia"l website. No its not a facebook or anything like that, but I feel it fills a void in a particular niche. The problem I am having is figuring out a marketing plan to get people to sign up. When you're starting a new social website like this its kind of important for it too feel popular and you need users to make it feel popular and useful. Which kind of gets you into a chicken or the egg type scenario. There are a few keywords I intend on doing SEO for, but I don't think pure SEO will make this community popular. Some ideas I have: Creative "tell a friend" strategy that builds incentive to get friends signed up like win an ipad or something like that. I also want to make it easy to tell friends, so you can import contacts from facebook, twitter, and email contacts rather than typing in all those emails by hand. Targeting a few blogs related to this niche hoping that they will interview me about the website. Advertising on forums and blogs related to my niche. Making the site simple, visually appealing and intuitive so users can dive right in without thinking. Making a good enough product to where the site can get buzz on active subreddits and hackernews. I'm a software engineer by nature, so marketing isn't a strong suite of mine, but I'm no rookie to building popular websites either (just been a while). I'd like to get some ideas from the seomoz community on this. Thanks.
Branding | | NormanNewsome1 -
How to get people to visit your forum / get the conversation started?
Pretty straightforward question. I want to start a forum for people to discuss a niche, but have little experience building a popular forum.
Branding | | getbigyadig0 -
Link local online newspaper ad to newspaper's spash page or my site?
We just started advertising on the web version of our local newspaper. They suggest our ads go to a "splash page" they created for us on their site. The page haslinks , images and text taken from each of our main categories,. Plus links and feeds from our twitter and facebook pages. And a google map. This page shows a page authority 1 with 0 links. Is there any reason to link our ad to a page like this rather than going direct to our website page? Thank you Handcrafter
Branding | | stephenfishman0 -
Benefits of +1ing a Sub Page vs. Root Page
Say I'm on Nike and I +1 a soccer shoe page...does the Nike root page rank higher/for more terms for my google+ followers or would just the soccer shoe page?
Branding | | Hakkasan0 -
One big site or lots of little sites? Which is better for SEO and my business in general?
I realize there are some aspects of what I'm asking that only I can answer. With that said, I'm looking for some discussion about the pros / cons of each, and what are the most important factors that will push me one way or another. Let's say I have a company that has three products. One big brand, three little brands. Each of the little brands is focused on a particular sub-niche, all of which are in the general health & wellness niche. Either, I could create a large site for the big brand, with subsections for each product, and work hard on turning that domain into a goto site, with lots of articles, etc. The domain name for this one would be a made up word so I can fully control the search results. Or, another strategy would be to create smaller, "sniper" sites for each product, maybe even sites for each major search term that is interested in that product. These sites would have fewer articles. Descriptive, exact match domain names. Which is the best strategy? #1, #2, or a mixture of both? #1 seems legitimate, #2 seems a bit spammy. What are the pros and cons to each? Can anyone speak from experience about both these practices?
Branding | | monetize-2660060 -
Developing location pages
I need to expand our service offering to another city and focus our SEO efforts to that new location. Would it be best to purchase a new domain name and make a new website very similar to the existing website so we can better target the search engines? Same look and feel as the existing website. Or would it be better to create a landing page for the new location on the existing website to help stengthen the current domain name? If so, how do i focus the SERPs to the new location when the existing website is so focused around my current location?
Branding | | clearmotive0