serving maintenance page on website, will affect google indexing?

Question

I don't think this is an issue but my partner is worried that by only serving a maintenance page for 24 hours (as we need to restore the database as was accidently deleted) that it could have a negative affect on our Google index/rating?

Answer 1

I would follow Google’s recommendations on blacking out your website to protest SOPA. Specifically:

1. Return a 503 Service Unavailable status code for pages which are unavailable.
2. Make sure that robots.txt does not return a 503 status code.