While performing some upcoming maintenance, I'm going to have to redirect all site traffic to a maintenance page briefly. What's the proper status code to use for the redirect?
503 makes sense, but it's not technically a redirection status. 302 is a temp redirect, but wondering if that might have implications if the site is being spidered at the time.
I would use 503, too, combined with a Retry-After header. A proper robot should know how to handle this.