: Will "performing maintenance" page holder affect your seo and page rankings? If so, is there a better way to handle it? Let's say that theoretically you run a ecommerce shop. There may be times,

@Cody1181609

Here's how I've managed this in the past w/Apache (with no apparent change to ranking):

1. Create a maintenance page with a defined open/close for the maintenance window - make the maintenance window about twice the amount of time you anticipate maintenance to last so you can roll-back if necessary

2. Rewrite rule to direct traffic to maintenance page:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^1.2.3.4
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !maintenance.html$
RewriteRule .* /maintenance.html [L,R=307]


(Where 1.2.3.4 is a regexp for your IP)

3. Complete maintenance and testing, comment out rewrite directives

The 307 Temporary redirect is, to the best of my knowledge, the proper response header for a maintenance situation, I've never seen any problems with maintenance lasting 1-3 hours on moderately busy sites (i.e. 100-500 users/hour).

Edit:

Per John Mueller's comments, you should also configure your webserver to throw a 503 error with a Retry-After timeframe to indicate that spiders should not cache the contents of the maintenance page.

To this end, you could follow AskApache's 503/Retry-After HowTo.

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