Comments on: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

By: Edwin

Edwin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:15:10 +0000

There are other ways, not only 503, for example when your database server is down, it happened to me, fortunately google web crawler did’t visit my page that day.

[moderator note: if you are going to drop links that are totally unrelated to context, at least make the effort to format them correctly before I delete them]

By: Don

Don — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:07:30 +0000

Andy great to see you back. Your stuff is solid as usual. Thank God I have never ever contemplated using that maintenance plugin. What an absolute disaster. 75 percent of lost search traffic… Yikes

By: Taree

Taree — Sat, 30 May 2009 22:51:34 +0000

Interesting Andy, did you issue a (‘Retry-After: 12345′) value along with the 503 to say when to try again or just issue the 503? As i recall from the protocol guidelines, a 503 with no Retry After value defined is treated as a 500 response which is simply “Internal Server Error”.

So it may of been 6 days of Internal Server Error, and not “Come Back Later” responses.

I had my site 404 for almost 5 days due to a server collapse, and rankings didn’t budge not even for the more competitive stuff.

It will come back, it will be interesting to get a follow-up post of how the recovery progressed.

By: Charts

Charts — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:06:42 +0000

You are absolutely right. I had a site with 27K Alexa ranking, and PR3 page rank, and 5k UV. The site went down with 503 errors and my site was off for 2 days. Once the server was back, my ranking was dropped to 42K and 2K UV and finally the site got 503 errors 3-4 times and now there is no more traffic !

I think to have a good quality host is very very important else all the hard work is in vain due to problems in server.

By: affiliateguru

affiliateguru — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:48:58 +0000

as per my view and experiment that 503 header is spam for google, it will not redirect the traffic from one domain name to other domain name, becuase considered it spam.

By: Max

Max — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:01:47 +0000

A friend was running some flash game type sites and had a few days downtime getting the backups going again when the server went kaput. He said it noticably affected his rankings and traffic and took a little while to get it back upto what it was originally.

By: Andrea Vit

Andrea Vit — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:43:40 +0000

I used this status code for a short period (2 days) with 503 header “Retry After” without traffic drop.
Here’s the official suggestion by Google: http://bit.ly/V5v1o
Thank you for sharing your experience!
Greetings from Italy.

By: andreavit (Andrea Vit)

andreavit (Andrea Vit) — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:32:47 +0000

Andy Beal and status code 503: http://bit.ly/ysArR

By: Tatang Sulaeman

Tatang Sulaeman — Wed, 27 May 2009 01:16:10 +0000

I found when my website was unavailable for a few days people tend to think you’ve disappears of the face of the earth. unfortunately you get forgotten about too quickly. Having reliable service is a must, downtime for a big site is a major issue.

By: Beecher Bowers

Beecher Bowers — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:13:15 +0000

Hey, I ran into the same type of problem with Google being blocked from my sites. Evidently my hosting provider picked up their crawler as a denial of service attack or something since it was crawling pages like crazy.