Status: 503 Service Unavailable

[Anso_39]

Due to delivery problems via database feed and don’t want the resulting page “Sorry but no page can be delivered” indexed. Don’t know if it works but I’m giving all Mozilla and Opera browsers the “sorry page”, and robots are served “Status: 503 Service Unavailable”. Is it known if Google respect the answer and come back later for the same page? Is there a risk for being penalized for cloaking when I’m preventing useless error pages from being indexed?

[rfgdxm1]

Why not give the bots and the browsers the same "Status: 503 Service Unavailable"? That is the actual truth.

[Sharper]

The actual text down on the page is somewhat meaningless to the spider if your web server is sending it the correct 503 code in the headers. It'll pick the code up fine and not index the actual message.

However, if you want to send the 503 code with your own message and prevent IE from presenting it's own "user-friendly" error message to IE users, you may have to pad the page a bit with text to get beyond IE's minimum page size threshold.

[Net_Wizard]

Contrary to popular belief, I don't believe that Google penalize site specifically for cloaking especially in your case where you are returning a 503 error.

Cloaking is a tool, it's just a question of how you use it.

Cheers

[rfgdxm1]

I never stated I thought Google penalized for such.

[Anso_39]

Thanks, I changed the code some and return 503 header to all including the html “sorry but…” part. Interesting is that the server now set “X-Pad: avoid browser bug” in the header. Just have to figure out what that means.

[Net_Wizard]

>I never stated I thought Google penalized for such.

rfgdxm1, nowhere in my post is referring to your post, I was just answering the question of Anso_39 which is...

>Is there a risk for being penalized for cloaking when I’m preventing useless error pages from being indexed?

Isn't that most people believe that Google penalize cloaking? Come to think of it, after rereading your post several times....maybe...just maybe that was what you really mean when you said...

>That is the actual truth.

:D
Cheers