Down for maintenance?

when you take a site offline for maintenance, what code does modx give out to search engine robots?

Merely redirecting to a "maintenance page" is very bad SEO. If you're unlucky enough to have robots crawling at that time then your sites maintenance page is going to get cached.

then your sites maintenance page is going to get cached.

Not if you have:

That's still going to hurt SEO the referred to content not being available.

It ought to automatically return a 503. I know modx is just a framework. Saving the user having to sort it out. Pretty much ever CMS would do this.

I know modx is only a framework, but still.

I just checked an install of revo 2.2.1

I set the system setting 'site_status' to 0, logged out of the manager and checked the site.

I saw the message "The site is currently unavailable" (this message is also a system setting) and a 503 (service unavailable) header was also sent (determined by using Safari developer tools)

So to answer the original question

when you take a site offline for maintenance, what code does modx give out to search engine robots?

you get a 503 and a message - a robot should see the 503, a person will just see the message - which is easily changed if you so desire.

Excellent. That is what I wanted to hear.

Thanks