What is best practice for search engines when a website is under maintenance?

Posted by jamescridland on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by jamescridland
Published on 2014-06-01T18:03:24Z Indexed on 2014/06/02 3:59 UTC
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seo

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http-headers

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302-redirect

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http-code-503

I need around a week to transition a heavily data-driven website from one back end to another. During that time I do plan to attempt to keep some pages live, but they won't all work well or look brilliant. Some pages won't work at all.

What is the best way to ensure I don't scare Google? Should I hide everything from robots.txt, or mark everything that doesn't work as "503", or are there other things that I should be considering?

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