5 replies to this topic

[rjohnson]

I will be taking my server offline for a couple of hours, and that includes the site as well.
Could you give me some ideas as to what i should do to display a message to all users,
and how would this possibly affect search engine rankings if they index me at those times.

The only option I can think of is to setup an alternate ww2.domainname.com
and point it to another server and display the offline message there.
The other server would have a completely different IP and would be in a completely different city, and would only serve to display the offline message to users.

Thanks

[saschaeh]

I dont think you need to worry to much if it is only for couple hours.

Do it on the day that you have least traffic, probably Sunday sometime. I don't think the search engines will have a problem with it but lets see what that others say.

[kulpreet_singh]

I would suggest you only take down those parts which need to be taken down, and provide links to the parts that are still up. Also I would include a support link or a contact form.

Also I would give an estimate of how long the site will be down and try to stick to that timeline.

As far as I understand, if you are optimizing for a particular city, moving your servers to another state/country might affect it. However, if you are just optimizing for particular keywords, it should not affect your ranking.

[rjohnson]

thanks for the help. Really useful.
Ive decided to display a simple message page, and wont worry at all about the 2 hours down (as far as SEO goes).

[AbleReach]

My favorite "site down for maintenance" message is SitePoint's. They have a message that offers a pretty good discount on purchases made while the site is down. A link leads to the purchase page for their big list of books and kits. I think that's both thoughtful and smart.

[JohnMu]

Hi rjohnson

Here's what I would do:
- reduce DNS TTL to a minimum (5 minutes?) (this needs to be done in advance to allow propagation to all clients)
- set up an alternate server
- change the DNS over to the alternate server when you're taking down the site
- have the alternate server return result code 503 (for crawlers) with a readable message (for users)
- when you're done, restore the DNS

Done

By returning code 503 the search engines will know that the site is just away for maintenance and will continue to crawl it later on as if nothing happened.

John