current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

company blog
Stack Exchange Inbox Reputation and Badges
tour help
Join the Stack Overflow Community
Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, helping each other.
Join them; it only takes a minute:
Sign up
up vote 47 down vote favorite
10

Is there a HTTP status code to tell Google (and others) to go away, index me again later?

Basically, one that semantically tells clients that the site is down for maintenance?

The ones I have considered are

304 => Not modified
307 => Temporary redirect
410 => Gone
503 => Service Unavailable

I'm leaning towards the last one, but was just curious as to which one was proper choice.

share|improve this question
up vote 62 down vote accepted

HTTP 503 would be the most appropriate:

The Web server (running the Web site) is currently unable to handle the HTTP request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay.

This post on the Google Webmaster Central Forum is also relevant:

Yes - a 503 is the correct server response for "We're closed". If you substitute a normal HTML page saying "We're closed" and serve a 200 it's very likely to get indexed by Google.

If you give the Googlebot a 503, it will just go away and come back later without indexing what you give it.

UPDATE:

As for the php implementation, you may be interested in checking out the following article:

Also notice the retry-after header, where you can specify after how many seconds another request should be re-attempted.

share|improve this answer
up vote 5 down vote

From http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40132

503 (Service unavailable) The server is currently unavailable (because it is overloaded or down for maintenance). Generally, this is a temporary state.

share|improve this answer
up vote 3 down vote

I'd consider the 503 to be most appropriate, since the 5xx-group is meant for server errors in general.

share|improve this answer
up vote 3 down vote

503 Service Unavailable

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.