302 & 503 for temporary site down page: what to use for 'retry-after'?

Posted by Miak on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Miak
Published on 2012-09-17T01:08:11Z Indexed on 2012/09/17 3:53 UTC
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seo

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redirects

If I want to temporary take down a website but the timeframe could be from 1 day to 1-2 weeks, I know that a 302 redirect (to a down.html page for instance) is best in order to preserve the existing SEO value of the site.

I've also read that one should return a 503 status code for these types of situations but they seems to require setting a 'retry-after' time period.

What If I don't know how long it will be down for? can I leave out this part of the header

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance

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