Maintenance mode strategy with SEO in mind [closed]

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What are considered the best practices when putting your site in maintenance during an update? I'm asking because i'm not very fond of having a site with over 60k indexed pages in google throwing a 404 header actually telling Google that the sites has disappeared. I'd rather tell google that the site is gone for a few hours so the googlebot sho开发者_开发问答uld come back after a few hours and do nothing for now.

Just found this blogpost on the official Google webmaster blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html, straight from the source!

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Redirect 307 (or sending them back a maintenance page with a 503 code) to your site-down page will cause googlebot to come back later:

http://www.ivankristianto.com/web-development/programming/enable-maintenance-mode-with-htaccess/1619/

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It should be acceptable to use a rewrite or other redirect to push all traffic to a maintenance page which returns a status 503 - Service Unavailable. From the W3, a 503 should be used when:

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server.

See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.5.4 for more information about the 503 status code.

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You can do either of the following:

Add

Disallow: /

in robots.txt during the update. This tells the bot to not index anything right now. However, beware of the risk for it to start dropping pages in the index. I however don't think it would do that, but I'm not sure.

Use a rewriterule that catches all requests and do a 302 Moved Temporarily to your maintanance page. This is probably the safest bet.