Here's hoping some of you can learn from one of our recent mistakes.
A few days ago, we released the ability for users to create their own categories. To do that, we had to update the user database, which, given how many users we now have, meant taking the site down for about 30 minutes. And a funny (in hindsight only) thing happened during those 30 minutes - Google indexed our site, resulting in the following result being displayed when searching for "outright.com"
Embarrassing for sure, but how big a deal is it? Well, as it turns out, our organic search traffic from the keyword "outright" dropped 87% overnight. Yes, you read that correctly: 87%. Now, our traffic from that keyword is relatively small compared to most traffic sources, but it's a material drop nonetheless.
So what did we do wrong? Clearly, there's no way to anticipate when Google is going to hit your site, and there will be times when you need to take a site down. The key is, make sure your system maintenance page actually has a title and description on it. Sounds obvious, which it is, but we completely overlooked it. At least our site was re-crawled soon thereafter, so the drop-off was short lived.
So, do as we said, not as we did:-)
Outright is secure.