Do a google search for the term “budget“. Budget Rent-a-Car is #1 natural result.
Look at the title tag on the screenshot below. It says, “Budget.com Outage“.
Rule #1: Never put that the site is down in a title tag. Or that the site is down for maintenance because that could get crawled & indexed, show on the Search Results, and impact your Clickthroughs and Conversions! In this fast food economy, people with no loyalty might just try Hertz, or Dollar Rent-a-car.
It’s important that when Search Engine’s spider your site when it’s down, that they don’t pick up textual cues that will negatively impact indexing.
Site going offline for 10 Hours? Google recommends returning a 503 Service Unavailable Response.
Optimizing Title Tags is not just about getting the right keywords in your title tag, but about making sure the WRONG ones don’t get in there!
Hat tip to: FireBoy
No related posts.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Shimon, PLEASE do tell us (an the other search engines) when your site is down – just return HTTP result code 503 to requests for URLs (even if it’s for less than 10 hours
). You can include a friendly page for your visitors, the GoogleBot won’t look at it (or index it). Code 503 is a temporary error that tells us to come back later (and the GoogleBot will, don’t worry 
). You can use 503 for your whole site or just for parts of it, you can also use 503 when your server is on the verge of a meltdown and you’d prefer the GoogleBot comes back later when it’s quieter.
Had a similar situation when our site was down for 72 hours, wish I would have 503′d it. Good points gentlemen.
@JohnMu I think the point shimon is making is when the site is down, make sure there is no mention in the title tag, as what happened with Budget. shimon points to the proper source on what the proper procedure is (on the seroundtable.com).
Great find! Interesting such a big website would make such a careless mistake.