Effects of a long-term holding page/503 http code whilst site is being rebranded?

[AndrewAkesson]

We have a client who is adamant that during the rebranding of their company and website, a holding page is put in place from August 5^th till go-live date on August 21^st.

They don’t look like budging on the matter, therefore we are looking to set up a 503 HTTP code on the holding page to tell Google the site is down for maintenance and redirect all pages back to the holding page.

The general consensus is that implementing this for such a long period of time will see Google de-index all pages and the site will lose masses of traffic as a result for a substantial time afterwards.

It would be great to get some insight on best practice for this situation, how Google will determine the situation and the consequences of such actions.

If you have any case studies of similar situations or have firm knowledge of how this scenario would affect the site, I would be delighted to hear from you!

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Matt,

I think setting up a 503 HTTP code on the holding page and then using 302 redirects to point all pages to that page is a viable option. You could also consider having every page return a 503 error (make sure your robots.txt page does, as that will keep the search engines from continuing to crawl). The pages on the site will most likely fall out of the index while you're returning a 503, but that's OK since there won't be anything for your users to find anyway.

The key here is to add a Retry-After header with the GMT date and time your site will be available. That lets Google know when to come back and that the site isn't actually down/returning a 503 forever. Yoast has a great post on this at http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/ which I'd recommend checking out.

[AndrewAkesson]

Hi Ruth,

Thanks for the response. The multiple 302 in combination with a 503 seems like the best way to go. I'll check out the yoast post, hadn't thought about adding a 503 to the robots.txt as well.

Matt

[AndrewAkesson]

We found some negative effects of implementing the above, unfortunately.

Our process was:

1. Implement the holding page and place a 503 HTTP status into the header for the page, along with a come back later date when the site would be live again.
2. 302 every other page to the homepage (holding page).
3. The Robots was removed in this process.
4. Found that the homepage had been de-indexed - reinstated the Robots file with no disallow restrictions.
5. Still couldn't raise the site through branded search terms and returned the homepage back to a 200, indexed the page again in WMT and used social media to boost this process.
6. The homepage is now showing where it was before on the first page for branded terms.

We feel we didn't do anything wrong and wondered if anyone had any ideas if there were any errors in our process?

Cheers,

Matt.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Matt,

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that sounds like a pretty successful implementation to me - it makes total sense to me that Google would temporarily de-index your site if it was returning a 503; after all, there was nowhere for a user to go. The fact that you've been able to gain back your rankings afterward means that Google understood what was going on and didn't ding you for having a "broken" site, which is what the goal of this process should be.

Perhaps I'm not understanding your goals? If you want the holding/home page to stay indexed, then yes, a 200 response code is what that page should be returning - Google tries not to send traffic to pages consistently returning a 503. In your original question it sounded like you wanted to let Google know that the site was down for maintenance, but would return, in which case a 503 is really your best bet.