Costly SEO Mistake You Must Avoid
Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 1:02 am
Taking a site offline for maintenance.
Yes i know that a number of sites does so, one among them is eBay. Which regularly updates its site every Friday. Typically, during a regular maintenance period, eBay’s features are intermittently unavailable or slow. eBay always announces scheduled maintenance well in advance and states how long it will last.
eBay does not put up a “back in an hour sign” on its site while it performs its maintenance, and neither should you. Not only will users get annoyed, but what happens if a search engine spiders your site during this time? It won’t recognize the sign; it will simply assume your other pages have expired and remove them from the index. If that makes you shiver, it should. All of your hard SEO work to get to the top of the rankings will go down the drain until the search engine spiders come back. Consider setting up a mirror site for maintenance periods.
Regards
Yes i know that a number of sites does so, one among them is eBay. Which regularly updates its site every Friday. Typically, during a regular maintenance period, eBay’s features are intermittently unavailable or slow. eBay always announces scheduled maintenance well in advance and states how long it will last.
eBay does not put up a “back in an hour sign” on its site while it performs its maintenance, and neither should you. Not only will users get annoyed, but what happens if a search engine spiders your site during this time? It won’t recognize the sign; it will simply assume your other pages have expired and remove them from the index. If that makes you shiver, it should. All of your hard SEO work to get to the top of the rankings will go down the drain until the search engine spiders come back. Consider setting up a mirror site for maintenance periods.
Regards