Return 503 error instead of 404

Question

We moved an application to a different server and turned off the site in IIS on the old server. It looks like there are still web crawlers (Googlebot, Baidu, etc.) that are trying on the old IP address, so they get a 404 error. We would prefer them to get a 503 error so that they will try again later, which will give the DNS more time to propagate. Is there an easy/straightforward way to do this with IIS6?

Answer 1

You could create a "catch-all" page and add the following asp code:

context.context.Response.StatusCode =
(int)HttpStatusCode.ServiceUnavailable;