Googlebot crawling my site during maintenance

[barun]

Not sure if this has been posted before. What will happen to my SEO rankings if googlebot crawls my site during my maintenance window?

My site is not down and I do have a maintenance page put up.

[BillyS]

Not many of us can afford to keep our sites up 24/7 and own a development, testing and production site. Googlebot crawls all the time and as long as the page(s) are up the next time Googlebot comes back their does not seem to be any long term affect.

It would be nice to have a robots.txt standard that tells everyone to go away on a certain day.

[Receptional Andy]

There is an HTTP status code for this situation: 503 Service Unavailable [w3.org]

I would issue this status code along with your maintenance error and search engines will get the idea. You can also send a 'Retry-After' to let them know when maintenance will be complete.

What you don't want to do is deliver the same page for every URL request with a 200 status code.