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A comment on If blacking out your website, return status code 503 to avoid an SEO hit.

Re:If blacking out your website, return status code 503 to a... by suneilp on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @12:35AM (#3473891)
This is good advice.

Even better advice would be to serve different content for regular users. This is easily done through User Agent sniffing. You can do it at the app level or web server such as Apache's Rewrite rules.

Is this cloaking? It might be. However, for only a day, there shouldn't be any harm in it.

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Re:If blacking out your website, return status code 503 to a... by SquareWheel on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @02:09AM (#3474081)
I'd be cautious of that method. Google is not a fan of cloaking, and you might wind up with a penalty for much longer than the blackout.
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