title: How do I stop search engines indexing a maintenance page
body: <p>I need to setup a maintenance page for a website I'm running, e.g. for display when I'm performing site maintenance (scheduled downtime) or if something really breaks and I need to put up a holding page.</p>
  
  <p>Is there anything special I need to do to ensure that search engine crawlers don't index it and think that it's my site. Or should I do a 404, add a temporary robots.txt file or something? I basically don't want them to index it as my site, but I also don't want them to think my site is dead and not come back.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong> Here's what I did in Apache: ErrorDocument 503 /.server-maintenance.html RewriteEngine On RewriteRule !^.server-maintenance.html /server-maintenance Redirect 503 /server-maintenance<strong>strong text</strong></p>