title: IIS 8 Application Initialization HTTP Status Code & SEO
body: <p>I am using the new <a href="http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/whats-new-in-iis-8/iis-80-application-initialization" rel="noreferrer">Application Initialization</a> feature of IIS 8 for our web application.</p>
  
  <p>Everything is setup correct and the first time we hit the site we are shown startup.html as defined in our web config:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  &lt;applicationInitialization
      remapManagedRequestsTo="/startup.html"
      skipManagedModules="true" &gt;
      &lt;add initializationPage="/" /&gt;
    &lt;/applicationInitialization&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem is, the startup.html page is returned with HTTP status code 200!</p>
  
  <p>This means for SEO, Google and other search engines may grab the startup.html page instead of the homepage if indexing the site when the application has not been initialized.</p>
  
  <p>Surely the response code should be:</p>
  
  <pre><code>503 - the server is temporarily unavailable
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there any way to change the response code of the static HTML page?</p>
  
  <p>(Note: this cannot be done from code as the ASP.NET pipeline would be initalizing)</p>