If i take my website offline for maintenance, does that ruin my Google Juice (tm)?

Question

Hi folks,

if I take my website offline (eg. for an IIS7 site, I'm using the app_offline.htm file), then all requests goto my maintenance page.

But, Google (and other search engines) don't 'know' that? they try to hit http://www.blahblah.com/whatever and it returns the maintenance page (and a 404 http status .. which IMO is BAD .. shouldn't it be 50<something> SERVER UNAVAILABLE, but that's another debate for another day... )

anyways ... as the google bot is crawling my site .. and my site is offline ... will that mean google thinks my site has bad pages/links/etc.. and as such ... damages my google juice score/rating/magic stuff?

are there tricks to tell google bot 'easy tiger! my site's offline so be nice to me 'cause u're not going to find anything to trawl' .. ??

Answer 1

You should respond with a 503 Service Unavailable with a Retry-After header. See:

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-about-googlebot.html
• http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015171.html
• http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/handle-googlebot-during-site-downtime/

Answer 2

Drop the following two lines in a 'robots.txt' file on the root and bots will stay away.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Remember to remove it afterwards ;)

You can get quite specific on how the bots crawl your site with this text file. Check Robots exclusion standard on Wikipedia for more info.