I recently wrote an article about the various SEO-related mistakes that can cost your site its position in the search engine results pages (SERPs), to say nothing of traffic and conversions. Frankly, there are enough of these to fill a book, so I’m writing a second article on the subject.
I’m going to start by talking about one version of site accessibility. Kalena Jordan, writing for Site Pro News, mentioned two scenarios that I sincerely hope we don’t see too often today. The first one involves taking a site offline for maintenance. It’s true that eBay does regular maintenance on its site every week, on Friday, but that fact is very well-known to the regulars and easy to find out if you’re new. Typically, during a regular maintenance period, eBay’s features are intermittently unavailable or slow. eBay always announces scheduled maintenance well in advance and states how long it will last.
eBay does not put up a “back in an hour sign” on its site while it performs its maintenance, and neither should you. Not only will users get annoyed, but what happens if a search engine spiders your site during this time? It won’t recognize the sign; it will simply assume your other pages have expired and remove them from the index. If that makes you shiver, it should. All of your hard SEO work to get to the top of the rankings will go down the drain until the search engine spiders come back. Consider setting up a mirror site for maintenance periods.
Another situation Jordan mentioned involved one of her now ex-clients, who took her site down for three whole weeks during her Christmas vacation, without telling Jordan. She’d just spent a month getting good rankings for the site, too, which all went down the drain. A web site is not like a brick-and-mortar business. Even if you have no one there to take phone calls, the site can act as a sort of “information stand-in,” letting people know what you have to offer.
You can certainly put a note on the site explaining that the principals are on vacation and the business is temporarily closed, mentioning when you’ll be back – but by all means leave the rest of the site up. It will give your site a chance to climb in the SERPs, and rather than abandoning your site completely, visitors might consider what they’d like to purchase when you get back. It’s better still, of course, if you set up your site so that they can still place orders, with the understanding that you’ll fill them as soon as you can when you get back.
Search Optimization 
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