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.sh
To 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 HTML 3.2//EN"> <html> <head> <title>503 - Service temporary unavailable</title> </head> <body> <h1>503 - Service temporary unavailable</h1> <p>Sorry, this website is currently down for maintainance please retry in a few minutes</p> </body> </html> EOF
Step 2:
Then add this to your virtual host config:
ScriptAlias / /path/to/your/503.sh/
Please note the trailing slash! It’s needed!
Step 3:
Restart Apache
Tags: Apache, Google, How-To, Linux, Networking, SEO Spam, Tech, Technology, Tips and Tricks, Unix
Categories: Tech, Tips and Tricks, Tutorials
