HTTP status code 503... it works.

[justpassing]

Hello,

Just saying that Google is greatly handling the 503 (Service Unavailable) HTTP status code.

Earlier this year, for-a-reason-which-is-showing-how-much-I-suck-as-an-admin, I broke one of my site, and I had to take it off-line for 4 months before I was able to fix it.

During the whole period, I served a 503 error code, to all requests.

When I was finally able to bring the site on-line again, there was no trace of Googlebot (I mention it, because it's the most active crawler, so this is my point of reference). Then 24 hours, there was a one hit, on the home page, then 12 hours later another hit , still on the home page. I assume that Googlebot was testing if the site was back on-line, and then testing if if t was staying like that. Then, two days later, a very huge activity of Google bot, 100.000+ pages visited in 24 hours. One week day for day, this site recovered its ranking and traffic as if nothing happened. Now, 6 months have passed, and the traffic is rock solid.

So just to say:
- breaking your site is bad,
- having a site taken off-line for months, is bad, and terrible user experience,
- but relax, Google is smart enough to understand that this kind of misadventure can happen, and will not punish you for this.

Regards,

[keyplyr]

And here I thought life was unfair.

[Leosghost]

And here I thought life was unfair.

Life itself is a bonus..how it plays out is the experience..

Google is smart enough to understand that this kind of misadventure can happen, and will not punish you for this.

Most search engines work this way..if anything Bing is even more persistent than Google, a page once seen by Bing bot is rarely if ever not asked for again..and again..and again..for months..and again sometimes years later..

[lucy24]

and again sometimes years later..

I've got one page* that's been returning a 410 since September of 2014. At this point, the only search engine that ever requests it--typically 10-15 times a month, or every 2-3 days--is Bing. Similarly for a clutch of pages that have returned the same 301 codes to the same targets since late 2013. Whenever I misspell the name of a new page, I have to leave a redirect in place for years, purely for bing's benefit.

It's interesting that google did a full re-crawl of the site once they found it was back in the land of the living. That makes it look as if they're treating it like a brand-new discovery. They do the same thing when you first go https.


* Actually four pages fitting the identical pattern, but for some reason bing is only interested in one of them.