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Using '503 Server Unavailable' For Extended Periods Can Kill Site Traffic  By
Andy Beard
This is a post I am sure the "Andy Beard Haters Club" will gloat over, but as I haven't been able to find a resource anywhere on the effect extended use of 503 Service Unavailable can potentially have on a site, and in particular the effect on search traffic, I thought I should write about it.  This isn't your typical scenario - 503 errors are frequently sent when a server becomes overloaded, or there are some backend problems. A search of the Google Webmaster Help forums doesn't bring up a huge amount of cases, and mostly it is enquiring about what someone should do when they want to do some maintenance on a live server, probably for a short time. In my case I didn't plan to be in "Maintenance Mode" for an extended period. Here is the complete timeline: • April 6th - I received an email from Jeff Walker announcing that he would be reopening PLF2.2+ in 2 weeks time - I had been working on some unique WordPress split-testing stuff that I thought would be a useful high perceived value bonus to my audience - it was time to reawaken the blog anyway. • April 6th Late - activated maintenance mode plugin with a custom theme - I added some stuff about PLF 2.2 and a subscription form for notifications - also still had tracking code on the page. • April 12th - Even though it was the weekend, noticed a significant reduction in search traffic
"• April 15th - Due to problems with the maintenance mode plugin and access permissions, I was forced to open up more of the site than I intended - I was trying to have it set up so that only the feeds and a couple of landing pages could be access by non-admins - it didn't quite work as expected, so I opened the whole site up. • April 15th - posted first blog post in 9 months • April 15th onwards - tinkering with site structure - I had gone live with a lot missing such as custom query string revisited, thus indexing depth could be a problem. • May 2nd - might seem totally silly, but this marks the day I added Google Analytics back on the blog - 2 weeks with no stats at all was both infuriating for a stats junky, but at the same time helped me to remove the shackles - at least off of one leg. • May 20th - bit the bullet and switched permalinks for most of the site (possible article) - also removed robots.txt from a few historical posts (more on that to follow) • May 25th - Seeing if search will recover I only expected to be down for 2 or 3 days, and switching on maintenance mode was a great way of focusing my attention on what needed to be done. Continue reading this article.
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