Temporary Blog Removal Process Question

[Ben-R]

Hello,

We need to temporarily remove our entire blog from one of our sites. They rely very heavily on the blog content; as the rest of the site does not have much. Is there a 'best' process for going about this? – Should we put a 302 redirect on the entire blog and if so should it be to the homepage or an under-construction type page?

Any extra insight or suggestions would be helpful and appreciated.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Thank you in advance for the help.

Best,

[ChrisAshton]

That's a very tough situation. Unless by "temporary" you mean a day or two, removing the only section of the site that's providing real value is almost definitely going to see a pronounced downturn in your rankings.

I suppose the best way to handle it is the 302 to a "Sorry, our blog is undergoing some maintenance and will be back in March" type of page.

What I would actually suggest to a client in this scenario though is to build the new blog (assuming that's what's happening here) and have it ready to go before taking the current one down. You've probably thought of that though so I imagine there's something in this scenario that makes it impossible?

[Ben-R]

Thank you, Chris. We were thinking of taking the 302 redirect approach. The issue is actually with all of the images used on the blog articles. There are 100’s of posts and many from a few years ago need to be evaluated for copyright concerns. While we sort through all of them we will need to take the blog down temporarily.

Let us know if you have any other suggestions/approaches you think would be best. The extra insight is appreciated.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Thanks again.

Best,

[ChrisAshton]

No problem at all.

The legal implications certainly make it more complicated! Unfortunately the only suggestion I could really offer here is to block out a time where you can get through them all at once or withing a day or two max.

The longer they're down, the greater the chance you'll drop in rankings and not see an easy recovery.

It may even be worth doing them in batches of 10 - 20 posts and re-publishing them as you finish each batch. At least this way you're steadily minimising the number of pages that are offline rather than taking the all or nothing approach.