503 STATUS MISUSE – 1 BIG GOOGLE RANKING FACTOR?

If you have to take your website offline for any reason, such as for doing backend maintenance or if you are re-doing an entire site after it has been hacked, it is important to use a 503 server status code for SEO reasons.

Using a 503 server status code tells Google and other search crawlers that the site is still in use, but that you are just temporarily down for maintenance related issues, and you expect to have the website back online soon. When done correctly, you can even specify when the maintenance or downtime is scheduled to be over, so that crawlers can return at this time.

503 Service unavailable is the server code you want to be returning to Google and other crawlers when you’re dealing with site maintenance. Error code 503 tells Google and the other crawlers that you are in fact working on this page or that something else went wrong. Google and the other crawlers understand that when the 503 status code is returned, to check the page again later on.

If you do not use a server status code and start delivering 404 server status codes to Google and other crawlers, especially if the downtime extends longer than a couple of hours, Google could interpret all of those 404s to mean that the website has been removed. This will have a serious impact on rankings even when the site comes back online again.

One way of misusing the 503 status code is to have the server send a 503 status, even though you have no near term intention of bringing the website back online.

To overcome a loss of page rankings, you need to return a 503 status code whenever working on a particular page. The original definition of the 503 status code, according to this RFC, is:

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.

This means that a website returning a 503, in combination with a Retry-After header, will tell Google and other crawlers how many minutes to wait before coming back. Google and other crawlers may not crawl again in exactly those number of minutes, but it’ll ensure the crawlers don’t come back around to take a look anytime sooner.