What is the correct HTTP status code to send when a site is down for maintenance?

Posted by alex on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by alex
Published on 2010-05-07T06:21:37Z Indexed on 2010/05/07 6:28 UTC
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http

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http-response-codes

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php

Is there a HTTP status code to tell Google (and others) to go away, index me again later?

Basically, one that semantically tells clients that the site is down for maintenance?

The ones I have considered are

304 => Not modified
307 => Temporary redirect
410 => Gone
503 => Service Unavailable

I'm leaning towards the last one, but was just curious as to which one was proper choice.

Thanks

Update

Is this the correct way to send it with PHP?

header('Status: 503 Service Unavailable');

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