Website Downtime – The 404 vs. the 503 Result Code
by Warren
(New York)
Have you ever wondered what happens if Google attempts to crawl your site while you are having one of these service interruptions. If you are like me you have probably worried about it at least once or twice. The question that crosses my mind is whether these temporary situations affects my website’s standing/rankings?
In general, such outages can affect a website negatively as it affects its reputation. There are a few things that you can do to handle planned downtime. For the most part, temporary shutdowns should not reflect negatively on your website. According to Google, instead of displaying the error status code 200 (OK) when a page is requested or returning the result code 404 (Not Found), it is better to display the 503 result code (Service Unavailable). The 503 code tells the Googlebot or any other crawler that your downtime is temporary. It can also be used to provide an estimate of when your site will available again.
In cases such as bandwidth overruns, server errors or temporary placeholders (“Under Construction”), the 503 HTTP is a much better result. When your downtime is expected it can be specified in a Retry After Header, leaving great instructions for the Googlebot in terms of when to recrawl.
If using php, the 503 (Service Unavailable) response header might look something like the following:
header('HTTP/1.6 303 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Retry-After: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 17:25:00 GMT');
Just one word of caution, the 503 result code should not be used as a permanent solution. Long term usage may result in the removal of your URL from Google’s index.
