Maintenance mode (SEO meaning: a website temporarily shows a notice page while work is done) should answer with HTTP status 503 Service Unavailable. That tells crawlers the outage is temporary and keeps the URLs in the index.
What should the server send in maintenance mode?
Google’s guidance on temporarily disabling a website advises an informational error page with a 503 status for a site that is down for 1 to 2 days. The guidance is written for online shops but applies to any website. The optional Retry-After header gives a date or a duration after which crawlers may try again. MDN describes 503 as the status for temporary conditions such as server maintenance and recommends a user-friendly page along with it.
Google warns against other signals for site-wide closures. A noindex tag or X-Robots-Tag header removes URLs from Search, and 403, 404 and 410 responses are the wrong answer too. The robots.txt file must not return 503, and Google’s robots.txt documentation says that server errors on robots.txt make Google stop crawling the site at first. While pages return 503, Google cannot refresh titles, descriptions or structured data.
How long can maintenance mode last?
Google’s crawl-rate documentation says that if Googlebot sees 500, 503 or 429 on the same URL for multiple days, the URL may be dropped from the index. For a longer closure, Google suggests an indexable home page with status 200 as a placeholder.
| Status code | Meaning per RFC | How Googlebot reacts | Effect on the index | Retry-After |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 429 Too Many Requests | too many requests in a given amount of time (rate limiting, RFC 6585) | treated as a sign of an overloaded server and as a server error; crawling temporarily slows down | indexed URLs are kept for now; if Googlebot sees the code on the same URL for multiple days, it may be dropped | RFC: may be included; Google: tells crawlers when they can retry |
| 500 Internal Server Error | unexpected condition on the server | the site's crawl rate drops in proportion to the number of URLs returning a server error | indexed URLs are kept for now; persistent errors get them removed, possibly after multiple days on the same URL | Google only describes it for 503 and 429 |
| 502 Bad Gateway | a gateway or proxy got an invalid response from the server behind it | same as 500 | indexed URLs are kept for now and removed if the error persists | Google only describes it for 503 and 429 |
| 503 Service Unavailable | temporarily unavailable, for example due to overload or maintenance | same as 500 | indexed URLs are kept for now; if Googlebot sees the code on the same URL for multiple days, it may be dropped | RFC: may be included and states the expected downtime; Google: tells crawlers when they can retry (seconds or a date) |
| 504 Gateway Timeout | a gateway or proxy didn't get a timely response from the server behind it | not listed individually by Google; for all 5xx codes, crawling temporarily slows down | indexed URLs are kept for now but eventually dropped (statement for all 5xx) | Google only describes it for 503 and 429 |
Google ignores any content it receives with a 5xx response. Once the server responds with 2xx again, Google gradually increases the crawl rate. To deliberately reduce crawling for a short time (a few hours up to 1-2 days), Google names 500, 503 or 429 and advises against doing so for longer. Google treats network timeouts, connection resets and DNS errors similarly to 5xx errors; according to Google, unreachable URLs are removed from the index within days. Sources: Google Crawling Infrastructure: How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers (last updated 2026-02-04); Google Crawling Infrastructure: Reduce the Google crawl rate (last updated 2026-10-06); Google Crawling Infrastructure: Debug network and DNS errors (last updated 2025-12-18); RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics, 15.6 Server Error 5xx and 10.2.3 Retry-After; RFC 6585: Additional HTTP Status Codes, 4. 429 Too Many Requests. Last checked: .
Example
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Retry-After: 3600
Content-Type: text/html
The body explains to visitors when the site will be back.
Common mistakes
- The maintenance page returns 200 and looks like normal content to crawlers.
- robots.txt returns 503.
- Maintenance mode stays active after an update.
FAQ
How do I turn maintenance mode off? Remove the maintenance setting in your CMS or server and check that pages return 200 again.
Sources
- Temporarily pause or disable a website – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Reduce the Google crawl rate – Google Crawling Infrastructuredevelopers.google.com
- robots.txt specifications – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- 503 Service Unavailable – MDN Web Docsdeveloper.mozilla.org
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