Google: Avoid Using “Coming Back Soon” Pages For Site Migrations

Google’s John Mueller said he would “try very hard to avoid having a “coming back soon” page during a revamp.” He said if you must have the “coming back soon” page then do so for a day or so but serve a 503 server status code.

John wrote this on Twitter, “I’d try very hard to avoid having a “coming back soon” page during a revamp. I don’t think you’d gain a lot by bouncing it back & forth.” “If you need it for <1-2 days, I’d just 503. For anything longer, it’s going to be painful regardless of how you do it,” he added.

Back in 2009 John said something similar, saying, “Tip of the day: If you have a generic “your site will be hosted here soon” page, use “noindex” or 503 result code, thanks!”

But John is now clarifying that the 503 should not be used for more than a couple of days. In fact, previously, John said 503s are for hours, not a solution for something that will take place for weeks. We covered the topic of 503 status codes a lot here over the years.

Here are these tweets:

that’s the solution am going with anyway as I’m sure it’s a better approach than each page returning a 404 or 503 status

— Dave Ashworth (@dave_ashworth) April 28, 2023

yeah, there’s nothing I can do about it, the new site launches on May 10th (so didn’t fancy 503), has to be done this way so that no new orders can be taken which go into the existing system, they need this time period to get all the back end services in place for the new launch

— Dave Ashworth (@dave_ashworth) April 28, 2023

it’s started, on Wednesday, initially everything bar the home page 404’d. New site will be a new brand with slightly different catregory/structure etc, so for non-SEO reasons, we can’t have a temporary site in place. Real world issues, not technical, but I have to do what I can

— Dave Ashworth (@dave_ashworth) April 28, 2023

as in, non-SEO reasons drive the necessity for a holding page. FWIW, there are 20k indexed pages, and this is the traffic from the last 3 months pic.twitter.com/Nk3LUd8D1X

— Dave Ashworth (@dave_ashworth) April 28, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.