Best way to display maintenence mode on a website?

[marianoSoler98]

I have a website with lots of traffic and sometimes the backends fail. I want to use lighttpd to show that the website is under mantenence and should be back up shortly.

I was thinking of using Soft 503 errors or doing a 302 for every page to /maintenance.html.

What would you do (besides fixing the backends, we are already doing that :P) to avoid hurting your SEO efforts?

Thanks in advance

Mariano

[stevenmusumeche]

I asked this question to Jane Copeland a few months ago and her answer was to return a 503 error code, which sends a signal that your site is temporarily unavailable to the search engines.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

[KeriMorgret]

The Google Webmaster Central blog advises to use a 503 for planned downtown (and bandwidth-overruns) in their January 2011 post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html.