Proper way to tell Google there's backend problems ?

What do you think is the proper thing to do in an event like a database connection failure ?

Keep in mind this is for relatively small operations where internally mirroring the entire database to another location is not an option.

I can think of a handfull things to do.

Send an HTTP 503 response.

Send a 302 redirect to an internally cached copy of an index.

Fetch an internally cached copy of an index in the background & serve that.

Request a cached copy of the requested resource from Google in the background & serve that.

Send a 302 redirect to Googles cached copy if it exists.

I kinda like the last one myself at the moment, falling back to a 503 response if Google doesn't have it cached.

The 302 redirect to a google cache might seem suspect to google.

Personally i would say the safest thing to do is get an internally cached copy of the page and serve that, Or 302 redirect to the internally cached copy.

Even if the address of the page in their cache matches the address of the resource they've requested ?

They may not have accounted for that in thier algo so may automaticaly flag it as spammy. The best thing to do it make it look as though everything is normal and nothing has changed.

Makes sense, thanks meman.

Hey Joebert whats going on with your site.

Why ?