Every webmaster has gone through the issue of having to deal with a site that must go offline for one reason or another for an extended period of time. Either you need to move servers, a hurricane hit your servers, your site was hijacked or something else. When there are no alternatives, and your site is offline – how do you save your site’s rankings in Google?
The answer is to use a 503 Service Unavailable server response code.
But what if the server is down and you can’t add the server response code? The answer is to switch the server by editing the DNS record.
John Mueller from Google posted his advice on this at Google+, he wrote:
This is important advice to be reminded about, because this stuff doesn’t come up all that often and when it does, webmasters and SEOs often scramble and are unsure what to do.
Here are some of our other stories on this topic:
SEO Tip: NoIndex Or 503 Site Coming Soon Pages
SEO Considerations For SOPA Website Blackouts
Site Downtime & Worried About Google? Return 503 Status Code
Site Going Offline For 10 Hours? Google Recommends Returning a 503 Service Unavailable Response
Forum discussion at Google+.
