What is the correct HTTP status code to send when a site is down for maintenance?

Question

Is there a HTTP status code to tell Google (and others) to go away, index me again later?

Basically, one that semantically tells clients that the site is down for maintenance?

The ones I have considered are

304 => Not modified
307 => Temporary redirect
410 => Gone
503 => Service Unavailable

I'm leaning towards the last one, but was just curious as to which one was proper choice.

Answer 1

HTTP 503 - Service Unavailable would be the most appropriate.

The Web server (running the Web site) is currently unable to handle the HTTP 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.

This post on the Google Webmaster Central Forum is also relevant:

• Can I restrict Google from crawling my site on a specific day of the week?

Yes - a 503 is the correct server response for "We're closed". If you substitute a normal HTML page saying "We're closed" and serve a 200 it's very likely to get indexed by Google.

If you give the Googlebot a 503, it will just go away and come back later without indexing what you give it.

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UPDATE:

As for the php implementation, you may be interested in checking out the following article:

• The holding page and the 503 status code

Also notice the retry-after header, where you can specify after how many seconds another request should be re-attempted.