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I'm redesigning my small business' website. I will be putting up a temporarily 'under construction' splash page. I know, I know... but it will be one in style, I hope. :)

What, mostly for SEO purposes, is the best HTTP status code to dish out for the URLs that will be temporarily unavailable (the same URLs will have content again, after the new site is up).

Now, my website traffic is hardly of any importance, but as a webdeveloper I want this knowledge in my toolbox for possible future client projects. And what better way to test and experiment with this, now that I have a convenient 'reason' with my own website.

Here's a few I thought about:
503 looks appealing, but is in the category of server errors.
204 looks appealing as well, but I'd rather temporarily redirect to the splash page.
307 looks like the best choice, but I'm not entirely sure.

There are a few others as well. So I'm curious to hear your advice. Thanks

Sathyajith Bhat
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Decent Dabbler
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1 Answers1

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I disagree to the selected answer. I would use the 503 code.

According to the RFC for HTTP/1.1:

503 Service Unavailable

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay.

Yes, it should be an error, because the expected page will not appear.

Community
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Jan K. S.
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    Note this is not claimed just by wikipedia. This interpretation actually comes from the RFC - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.5.4 – Jan Matějka May 31 '13 at 13:16
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    Yes, you are right. And I've just checked: Wikipedia points that link as the source for many statements. – Jan K. S. Jun 05 '13 at 12:40
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    Google suggests 503 too - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html "We encounter a lot of problems with sites that return 200 (OK) result codes for server errors, downtime, bandwidth-overruns or for temporary placeholder pages (“Under Construction”). The 503 HTTP result code is the webmaster’s solution of choice for all these situations." – Aigars Matulis Sep 28 '13 at 12:13
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    I was given different templates for for both 503 and temporary maintenance , and I need to name them by the code, so I use 307. The semantics are 307 is planned; 503 is unplanned. But I'm open to your feedback. – toddmo Jan 10 '17 at 18:07