Site maintenance and crawling

[Daylan]

Hey all,

Rarely, but sometimes we require to take down our site for server maintenance, upgrades or various other system/network reasons. More often than not these downtimes are avoidable and we can redirect or eliminate the client side downtime.

We have a 'down for maintenance - be back soon' page that is client facing. ANd outages are often no more than an hour tops.

My question is, if the site is crawled by Bing/Google at the time of site being down, what is the best way of ensuring the indexed links are not refreshed with this maintenance content? (ie: this is what the pages look like now, so this is what the SE will index).

I was thinking that add a no crawl to the robots.txt for the period of downtime and remove it once back up, but will this potentially affect results as well?

[KeriMorgret]

We just had a great YouMoz post on this (that was promoted to the main blog) that might help for your next maintenance window. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance

[Daylan]

Great post. Thanks very much.