Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Temporarily shut down a site
-
What would be the best way to temporarily shut down a site the right way and not have a negative impact on SEO?
-
I asked the Q&A associates their opinion, and several people also responded that a 503 would be the way to go.
-
It is due to some legal matter. So we need it to shut it down
-
Can you give us some more details about the shutdown (the reasons, why it needs to be so long, etc)? We can help you a bit better if we know more information.
When we switched from SEOmoz.org to moz.com, we were only down for half an hour, if that. If this is about upgrading, is there a testing server that you can use to get the website rebuilt and tested on the testing/staging server before you make it live? We used multiple staging servers to test out the site and did lots of checks so that we had minimal downtime when it came time to move the site.
-
What if it is more than a week?
-
I'm also assuming that you're talking about just a day or two, and not two months. There was a post on Moz last year about this that can also help, in addition to the good info provided by CleverPhD http://moz.com/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance
-
Appreciate the positive comment EGOL!
-
That was a great answer. Thanks. I didn't know that.
-
Thank you - please mark my response as Good Answer if it helps.
Cheers!
-
Thank you
-
According to Matt Cutts
"According to Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts if your website is down just for a day, such as your host being down or a server transfer, there shouldn't be any negative impact to your search rankings. However, if the downtime is extended, such as for two weeks, it could have impact on your search rankings because Google doesn't necessarily want to send the user to a website that they know has been down, because it provides the user with a poor user experience.
Google does make allowances for websites that are sporadically having downtime, so Googlebot will visit again 24 hours later so and see if the site is accessible."
That said, what should you show Google?
http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/
According to Yoast, you should not show a 200 (ok) or 404 (file not found), but a 503 code on all pages with a retry-after header to Google.
The 503 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html) tells Google "The server is currently unable to handle the 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. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.:
The retry after tells Google when to come back. You should set this to a time that is generous to allow you plenty of time to get everything back up and running.
Another point from Yoast that he links to https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/Gas8vjZ5fmB - if the robots.txt file shows a 503 then Google will stop wasting time crawling all your pages (and wasting time) until it sees a 200 back on your robots.txt file. So it is key that you get the 503 and retry after properly on the robots.txt
Cheers!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Dealing with 404s during site migration
Hi everyone - What is the best way to deal with 404s on an old site when you're migrating to a new website? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?
Hi, Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site? is there any syntax i can use in Google search to list just pages that give 404? Tool/Site that can scan all pages in Google Index and give me this report. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Outbound Links to Authority sites
Will outbound links to a related topic on an authority site help, hurt or be irrelevanent for SEO purposes. And if beneficially, should it be Nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
How To Best Close An eCommerce Site?
We're closing down one of our eCommerce sites. What is the best approach to do this? The site has a modest link profile (a young site). It does have a run of site link to the parent site. It also has a couple hundred email subscribers and established accounts. Is there a gradual way to do this? How do I treat the subscribers and account holders? The impact won't be great, but I want to minimize collateral damage as much as possible. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0