serving maintenance page on website, will affect google indexing?

Question

I don't think this is an issue but my partner is worried that by only serving a maintenance page for 24 hours (as we need to restore the database as was accidently deleted) that it could have a negative affect on our Google index/rating?

Answer 1

I would follow Google’s recommendations on blacking out your website to protest SOPA. Specifically:

1. Return a 503 Service Unavailable status code for pages which are unavailable.
2. Make sure that robots.txt does not return a 503 status code.

Answer 2

I believe the best way to deal with this is throwing an error code 503 Service Unavailable and use a custom error document to style it more friendly.

Answer 3

You could exclude it from crawlers like Google's by using a robots.txt file in the root of the site for that 24 hour period.

Answer 4

to be sure that there are no problems, you should serve your page using the 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable status. Retry-After can also be set, but i am not sure if the google crawlers care about that.