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:
