Thursday, August 31st, 2006 Over a post in Google Webmaster Central Blogs Vanessa Fox stated that when your site goes down for maintenance tou should configure your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) rather than 200 (successful). This lets Googlebot know to try the pages again later.Searching for how i can make my Apache webserver return the 503 - Service Unavailable status code for a particular site on a shared hosting environment i found the following solution over http://wiki.splitbrain.org/503.shTo return 503 (Service Unavailable) status on Apache Web Server:Step 1: Create the following shellscript named 503.sh:#!/bin/sh cat <<EOF Status: 503 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD ...
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