What is best practice for search engines when a website is under maintenance?

Question

I need around a week to transition a heavily data-driven website from one back end to another. During that time I do plan to attempt to keep some pages live, but they won't all work well or look brilliant. Some pages won't work at all.

What is the best way to ensure I don't scare Google? Should I hide everything from robots.txt, or mark everything that doesn't work as "503", or are there other things that I should be considering?

possible duplicate of When updating root index.html how to show users that site is on maintenance now? — Zistoloen, Jun 01 '14 at 19:00
or this one... http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/55635/how-to-set-restrictions-on-my-website/55659#55659 — MrWhite, Jun 01 '14 at 21:19
@Zistoloen Not a duplicate for that; though the answer is similar, I notice. I have no interest in just changing one page. — jamescridland, Jun 02 '14 at 07:52
@w3d That is, indeed, a great answer to a similar issue - though hardly findable with the question the OP asked. Thanks. — jamescridland, Jun 02 '14 at 07:53

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 01 '14 at 19:00

2

503 everything is the best strategy I can think of, together with a retry after HTTP header.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html

edited Jun 01 '14 at 19:00

Zistoloen

10,036
6
35
59

answered Jun 01 '14 at 18:17

Roie Speiser

1,085
6
8

Great answer, thank you: great to see that Google have already thought of this one. I hadn't considered the "retry-after". – jamescridland Jun 01 '14 at 18:23
Thanks. I would also consider a custom 503 error page. You don't want to scare off your visitors with the ugly default message. Analytics code on this page is also recommended. – Roie Speiser Jun 01 '14 at 19:08

What is best practice for search engines when a website is under maintenance?

1 Answers1