Google Indexed/cached During Website Maintenance

[talismon]

We currently have several pages of our site that were updated with our 'maintenance page' and now the titles/descriptions are being displayed in the SERP's with this page.

What's the correct tag to put on our maintenance page to avoid this?

no index/no follow?

Thanks

[talismon]

Just a bit more info...

Right now, when the site is in a maintenance mode, all requests get 302 redirected to /system/maintenance.html. If we were to put a noindex on the maint page, I would assume it would get associated with the /system/maintenance.html URL, not the original URL, but I'm not positive. Does anyone know for sure?

[g1smd]

I would be careful with saying to not index the maintenance page content, as the redirect says to keep the original URL but index the content "over there" at the maintenance page.

Now you are saying that the content "over there" is not indexable. That, I think, would cause the original URL to drop out of the index too.

I have to ask, why do you take the site offline like that?

[tedster]

If you really must be offline (hopefully for a short period) I think the proper stauts code is 503 "Service Temporarily Unavailable."

10.5.4
503 Service Unavailable

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header.

W3C Protocols [w3.org]