Google and Website Downtime - what affect on rankings

[whatleywah]

I have a site that I know is going to have at least 12 hours of downtime shortly, is there anything that I can do to lessen the impact of the downtime with Google?

We are changing our hosting and the estimate from the new provider is 12 hours.

Has anyone had any experience in doing this before and can I realistically do anything to lessen the impact?

Any tips would be great guys.

[Robert Charlton]

The 503 service temporarily unavailable status code is intended for this situation. Per w3c.org [w3.org]...

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. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com] says...

If my site is down for maintenance, how can I tell Googlebot to come back later rather than to index the "down for maintenance" page?
You should configure your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) rather than 200 (successful). That lets Googlebot know to try the pages again later.

[Robert Charlton]

PS - The word "downtime" jumped out at me here. I should add, though, that in moving to a new host, if properly done, downtime should not be an issue. Simply having a working version of your site on both the old and new servers, and then change your DNS A-records.

In my experience, the transition has always been seamless, but I've never done this with a large dynamic site... only with static sites.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:38 pm (utc) on Jan. 21, 2008]

[travelin cat]

Our provider changed versions of their OS which caused our CMS to deliver a blank page, no error message, nothing.

This happened at 1:00 A.M. our time and we noticed this upon arriving in to work 7 hours later. After 1 hour wait and a total of 9 hours down we were back up and running.

No problems, no loss of ranking or anything else except of course 9 hours of no income and days off of my life expectancy...

[whatleywah]

Guys,

Thank you for the information, very helpful.

I think I need to speak in detail to the new providers and see if they can implement any of the suggestions.

Cheers

Chris

[Robert Charlton]

You might want to check this post on the topic by Matt Cutts....

Moving to a new webhost
[mattcutts.com...]