Minimise damage to SEO from offline site

[Bill Deakin]

Hi

I've been forced to take a site offline temporarily while a few changes are made. Obviously I'll be trying to get it back online ASAP but I've worked hard to get Google rankings over the past 2 years and I don't want all that work to go to waste. Is there anything I can do to minimise the damage? At the moment I've created a holding page saying we're offline for maintenance with a feedback form and forwarded all 404 requests to that.

Bill

[peterjhale]

Why have you taken your site offline ?

I would suggest you leave it online, then upload your new
content and 301 old pages to the new.

[Bill Deakin]

Thanks for the reply Peter but I'm not able to do that, don't want to go into the details of why here but basically the trademark owner are being very clear on what they want and as I reply on them for one of my businesses I don't want to argue!

301 won't be needed since the only changes will be minor edits on existing pages - old pages won't be deleted. I'm just wondering if there was a way to limit the damage, hoping that I can be up again within a few days. I was wondering if a robots nofollow tag would do more harm than good?

Bill

[peterjhale]

I saw your reply on another forum

Google's changing the rules on bidding on trademarked terms as from 5th May

https://adwords.google.com/support/b...92877&hl=en_GB

So I would hold out until then.

I would quickly make changes and put your site back up sharpish

All your pages now divert to a holding page - so every page is effectively the same. You will likely lose your rankings. Personally, I would simply change your index page to your new sqeeze page, not link to all your other pages but NOT direct your other pages to your index.

That means people going to your current index can't browse your site, but that also means Google can't browse your site and update the pages. The other pages will remain in Google's index for some weeks before they decide they are no longer required.

Does that make sense ?

[Bill Deakin]

Hi Peter

Thanks for that - wish I had found that out before asking for approval for that term!

Thanks for the advice

Bill