Robots and Meta Tag Question

[sanity]

Hi All,

Does anyone know of a meta tag that tells a robot that a site is currently being updated and all pages are reverting to the one URL and to come back later.

I hope this makes sense. During an upload we have all pages pointing to one page stating maintenance is being performed and the site will be back online in xx time. It is generally only an hour at the most - problems permitting of course :)

Anyway I want a way to tell the robots this and to come back later.

Thanks heaps!
sanity

[Kal]

I don't know of one, but wouldn't it make more sense to use an exclusion tag in a robots txt file or a "noindex, nofollow" tag until maintenance was complete?

[ihelpyou]

Moving to robots.txt forum. :)

[bigDugan]

This thread should probably be in the Meta Tags forums (http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/f3/s).

I'm not aware of one. Never really thought about this much. If I was a search engine spider, I would be aware that most maintenance is done during off hours.

[JuniorHarris]

Wow, that's a tough one.

It would appear that Murphy's law always requires a search engine spider to hit your site either during maintenance or when the host provider is performing system upgrades!

The only solution I can think of off the top of my head would require server access. It would actually involve creating two virtual directories which could be used to toggle the production site. This would allow the update of the off-line site, and then a quick and simple server change to point to the new [virtual] directory.

[sanity]

oops I should have realised it was in the wrong place - sorry.

bigDugan off hours mean different things depending on where you're located in the world, which makes it a bit hard.

Thanks for the input all.

sanity

[sanity]

Thanks JH appreciate your help! I'll pass it on to my technical person who can sort it out.

sanity

[Mel]

Hi JH and Sanity:

Depends on your server setup I guess but on my virtual hosting site I make a second directory off the root directory (which is excluded in the robots.txt file) load all my files into that directory and then rename the WWW directory to a third name and the second directory to www. Ther is only a second or two that one or the other is not visible.

[JuniorHarris]

Sounds like a great suggestion Mel!~ :up: Much easier to implement from an end user perspective, especially if direct server access is not available.

[bigDugan]

>off hours mean different things depending on where you're located in the world, which makes it a bit hard
So true. Funny cause I happened to see the googlebot hitting one of my sites that night around 3 AM. I stand corrected!
:)

[sanity]

Thanks everyone for your help. :cheers:

In the end it was down for about 20 minutes so I just put up the down for maintenance. For the next update though I'll try your suggestion Mel.

Sophie