How to protest SOPA without losing your SEO on WordPress
A lot of very high profile websites are planning an outage this week in protest of SOPA, the US government's perverse legislation which is essentially designed to hand the power to police the Internet over to corporate powers. If you don't already know what SOPA is, there are plenty of news articles detailing it already but let's just call it bad.
Very bad in fact. The type of bad that can kill the Internet as we know it, destroy free speech and change the way we surf the web forever. It's bad enough that Facebook may go dark to protest it. It's bad enough that Wikipedia is considering going offline and it's bad enough that every website owner should be writing their government official to ensure this doesn't go through.
How to participate in the SOPA blackout without losing your SEO
For website owners who are looking to protest SOPA, there are few choices except to participate in the blackout on Wednesday, but how can we do that while still protecting our existing SEO value?
Simply taking your website down for the day will result in a 404 error and cause Google to de-index your pages. Setting your robots.txt file to dis-allow everything will do the same thing, both will result in Google's robots assuming your website is no longer online but ... there is a solution. The 503 header is designed to tell search engine robots and visits that your website is temporarily unavailable and will return shortly.
I've created a free plugin to temporarily remove your website from the Internet (and allows you to leave a message for users) without hurting your SEO value, feel free to share it and download it for your own website.
