The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are two bills in front of Congress right now that aim at cracking down on Internet piracy but could instead restrict access to information. Many big web players are blacking their sites out today to protest these bills.
If you run a site and want to show your solidarity, but are worried you might negatively impact your SEO efforts, here’s a sane and Google-approved way to blackout your site temporarily.
In your site’s .htaccess file, add these lines:
RedirectMatch 503 ^/(?!yourblackoutpage\.html)
ErrorDocument 503 /yourblackoutpage.html
Header always set Retry-After "18000"
The 503 status code means that service is temporarily unavailable. If you’re blacking out only part of a site, make sure you exclude your robots.txt from this; otherwise, if you’re blacking out the whole site for a day, it’s fine to return a 503 from robots.txt.
