SEO Step By Step Guide–29.When to Use 503 Server Status Code

Most of us are familiar with following server status codes – 301, 302 and 404 but many of us may not be aware of 503 Status Code Error and even if we are familiar we would not been putting it into use effectively. The status codes are there to help the website owners, servers, search engines and the users to have a better understanding about our website at any given time. Those of us, who are interested in having our websites optimized with sound strategies, should make sure that we do not overlook factors that can possibly have adverse effect on our website’s ranking.

One of the poorly understood and poorly used server status codes is 503. This status code is used when you the server returns the status – “Service Unavailable”. This can happen when there is too heavy traffic in your website and also when your website is under maintenance. In such situations when search engine bots visit your site, they may not be able to index your website properly. So to avoid any such issues, it is important that the search engine bots are informed as soon as they visit your site. 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.

If your site is under maintenance, then the users too have to be informed that you are under maintenance or temporarily unavailable and the search engine bots should be informed through 503 server code. On the other hand, if your site is experiencing overload problem due to heavy visitor traffic, then the situation gets little tricky because we need to tell the search engine bots which happen to visit during heavy traffic to return after some time and at the same time not to discourage the visitors by telling them to visit at a later time. Using 503 – Service Unavailable code we can ensure that search engine bots crawl our site when there are no problems such as over load issues. This will help us preserve the current rank and if there are any improvements, it will reflect when the search engines re-index our pages.

If your servers are configured to return 200-OK status code, then it the search engine bot will not come back after sometime to index your site. It will comeback only after a couple of months when it is re-indexing. Meanwhile, you can lose your position or the results of your new SEO efforts will not be seen until the search engine bot successfully crawls your website. You will unnecessarily lose a lot of search engine time, which should be avoided at all costs.

Therefore, you can avoid many of the problems that are associated with server related issues by using the right server status codes and protect your search engine rankings as well as boost it.

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