PC World - You Don't Have To Have A Brain - But It Helps

Server maintenance is a nightmare, everyone knows that. But if you do have to put up a temporary page and you run a £multi-million business then think carefully how you manage the impact on the search engines.

I wonder if the "technical" department spoke with their SEO agency about the impact of the downtime on there search engine performance?

Well, I would have advised them to at the very least not put "SITE CURRENTLY DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE" in the title tag. It may only be there for a day or two, but people searching for their brand may not visit the site direct (if at all) whilst that message is present in the Google snippet - they may at they may even go via PPC.


Depending how much money you want to throw at the situation there are infinitiely many more productive solutions than taking a number of sites down completely. Couldn't they temporarily move a copy of the architecture to new servers in the process?

Shocking!