Redirects - during a few weeks maintenance

[stevelibby]

i have few smaller sites of a big one that i want to take down for maintenance and may take a couple weeks to sort out.
Now can i redirect them to my main site, is this google safe or should i just take em down with no redirect?
if i can redirect then what type refresh or straight response.redirect?

[tedster]

All I can say is ouch! A few weeks offline is a bit of a big hiccup. If you really can't serve even your home page during that time, I would probably recommend a 302 redirect.

Although, Matt Cutts made it clear this morning at PubCon that you can use a 301 even for a short "temporary" period, then change it back or redirect it elsewhere - just be rather free with it and not have problems with Google.

The reason I said use a 302 is that keeps the domain name alive in the index, where a 301 would not.

[Robert Charlton]

How does Google respond to a 503 Service Unavailable header? And, how would Google treat a 503 for this length of time... and would also using the Retry-After header help in this situation?

If you used the 503, you would, of course, lose traffic during your maintenance time, which might, in this situation, rule it out.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:30 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2007]