SEO Recap – 503 Status Code

There are several pretty familiar server status codes – including the 301, 302 and 404 status codes – but many of you may not be familiar with the
503 Status Code Error or even if you are familiar you have not been putting it into use effectively for

Proper SEO.

All status codes exist to help website owners, servers, search engines and users gain a better understanding about our website at any given time. If you are interested in having your websites optimized with sound strategies, you should definitely ensure that you don’t dismiss any possible factors that can have adverse effect on your website’s ranking.

Definitely one of the poorly understood and poorly used server status codes is 503. Most people don’t understand that this is normally a true server error, not something you’ve done wrong on your site, such as a page move, a linking error and so forth. This status code is used when your server returns the status – “Service Unavailable”.

Common reasons for this status error message include: there is too heavy traffic on your website or if your website is under maintenance. If search engine bots visit your site during this time, they may not be able to index your website properly. To avoid any such issues, it is important that the search engine bots are informed exactly what situation exists as soon as they visit your site so they don’t give up assuming your site is down for some reason and don’t bother to come back for a long time to check on you.

Don’t confuse the spider bots!
Basically, by using a 503 status code, you will be able to tell the search engine bots to return to your site after a specified period of time. This will ensure you don’t miss out on being indexed and that the delay will be shorter than if eh search engine bot simply decides you are unavailable and might not come back for a month!

Also keep in mind that if your site is under maintenance, the users too should be informed either of the fact that you are under maintenance or temporarily unavailable. You can use a custom page for this end, but still make sure that the search engine bots are being informed through the 503 server code.

One exception is if your site is experiencing overload problem due to heavy visitor traffic. You want to tell the bots to return after some time when traffic is not so heavy, but not discourage your visitor from trying again.

By using a 503 – Service Unavailable code we can ensure that search engine bots crawl your site when there are no problems such as over load issues, allowing you to avoid problems with current rank. If you’ve improved your site, this will be reflected when the search engines re-index your pages.

However, if your servers are configured to return 200-OK status code, then it the search engine bot will not come back to index your site anytime soon – instead, it will be a couple of months until you come up for re-indexing. Meanwhile, you could lose your ranking position or miss out on the benefits of your new SEO efforts. Using a 503 gets the bot to come back much sooner, saving you time in getting re-indexed.

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