Server Upgrade And Google

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Server Upgrade And Google

vicyankees

4:37 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

We have been forced to perform some server upgrades which require us to take our site offline for a few hours. What is the best way to handle with GoogleBot to ensure that the page is not indexed but that GoogleBot will return when the upgrade is complete?

Would this be the best method?

- Robots - NOARCHIVE, NOINDEX
- Set expiration date to the following day

tedster

6:45 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

There should be no problem with just going offline for a few hours. One of my clients did this accidentally for 30 hours once last fall and suffered no ill effect - and they came back with all new urls, too.

MHes

8:20 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

vicyankees - As Tedster says. I would NEVER suggest to google that it does not index a page/site..... you never know how seriously they will take you and for how long!

vicyankees

8:48 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

Ideally I'd like to have a page saying that the site is temporarily unavailable with a general phone number to contact. Granted we do the upgrades in the middle of the night - we still don't want to miss out on those clients. I also don't want to get hit with a dupe content penalty since I have this single page served up no matter which page they come to. Am I better off using 302s and calling the page something completely different?

MHes

8:57 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

Lose the business for a few hours rather than taking any risks. You could be playing with fire and lose business for many weeks.

Nostalgic Dave

9:16 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

In my niche market there is a hobby club site that the owner decided to discontinue. The site remained on the first page of the serps for MONTHS afterward. He decided to put it back up and it was as if the site had never left.

sem4u

9:28 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

I wouldn't worry about your site being down for a few hours. I know of sites that have been down for days that didn't lose rankings and were spidered again when they came back online.

Marcia

9:31 am on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

I've had a site down for several days, it slipped out and came right up again in the same place.

mattg3

12:03 pm on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

I had a Mysql error 3 weeks ago, that needed 16 hours to fix. Webmastertools showed many pages missing for a while now done to 731 missing. It comes back, but will depend on how often they crawl you, if the server outage is detected at all, and if it is then how long it takes to reindex.