Will setting my Joomla site to offline mode affect my SEO?

[fathat859]

Hi all.

My website (melodicaforums.com) is ranked quite well in Google for relevent keywords. However, as the site is currently under construction ive been thinking about setting it to offline mode in the joomla admin panel - so that a message will show up etc.

If I do this obviously it will affect my SEO if google visits my site... How much impact will it have? Can I expect my listings on google to dissapear for a few days until I make it live again? Or do I risk loosing my rank forever?

Cheers,
Jamie.
To add... by setting it to offline when you visit the URL it will show a message eg. this site is down etc under construction, and you will not be able to view any pages.

[kb62591]

Joomla is really trying to unseat Wordpress.

They never will.

I'd be careful with settings once you have a live site.

[Jake B]

Any downtown to your site while the crawlers and visitors come to your site is not good for your SEO and you would want to minimize it as much as possible. If it is down for a few days, it will have an impact and you will have to go through a phase of recovering your rankings and traffic. How long will depend on how many crawler visits there were, how many pages got dropped, etc.

[twix]

If you site is ranked well do not put it in offline mode... instead work on a copy of the website on your localhost / another server and replace the existing website with the new one.

If you put the site on offline mode you might loose all your rankings.

[responder5]

under construction websites will be put back as there are many developed websites to compete.

regarding putting a website to maintenance mode will not really hurt the website but it depends on how long you will put the website in that mode. Even google itself do the maintenance job but they select very less traffic time to do such things and moreover they inform their users ahead of doing it so it's an informed thing and not something like on and off when they want.

Regarding loosing rankings yes you will loose when google finds your website is under construction. but if you put a website to maintenance mode for some time (cpl of hours) then that should be fine.

When you put your website back and promote well and has quality content then you will slowly start seeing you site in search engine rankings for your targeted keywords.

last but not least, if you have no competition then don't even bother asking this question because you can get rank faster when you site is live and ready.

Your "melodica forums" (with quotes) keyword has very less competition in Google, hardly 443 page results