SEO and the importance of 503

July 14th, 2008

Today I arrived at work to find one of our, externally hosted, clients plummeting down the SERPS for terms that they would normally rank very highly for. As we always employ an ethical approach to our SEO campaigns I was a little bewildered by this sudden drop in rankings and decided to investigate. After a brief search through the Google results, there was the answer in the returned search listings.

Could not connect to database

This was the description on the returned results for our client’s website.

It would seem that when the site was last crawled the database was down and the client’s developer had returned the afore mentioned error message with a 200 OK header. So instead of our nicely optimised pages the search engines found zero relevant content and a server response header that said ‘Yeah sure! This is fine, this is what we want you to see’.

So what should we really be doing if a database connection fails?

We should be looking to our SEO friendly 503 (Service Temporarily Unavalable) header to let the search engines�know that there is a problem and to come back later. For details of implementing the 503 header there’s an excellent tutorial at http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/503-service-temporarily-unavailable.html

Dont get caught out. Check your SEO procedure for handling failed database connections and make sure you use the 503 header.

Entry Filed under: SEO, Website Design