If your website is down for more than a few days, Google will begin to remove the index of your pages from search results.
This was stated by Google’s search advocate John Mueller in a Google Search Central SEO office hour hangout recorded on December 10.
An SEO named Aakash Singh called on the live broadcast to ask Mueller how he minimized the impact on search rankings when his client’s website was closed for more than a week.
Unfortunately, for Singh and his clients, it is impossible to shut down the site for a week without any negative impact on its SEO and search rankings.
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Mueller said that if the pages of a website become inaccessible, it only takes a few days for them to start being de-indexed.
Mueller continues to propose an alternative method to deal with planned downtime, but still cannot guarantee that it will not cause any harm in the short term.
Read his full response in the section below.
Google’s John Mueller on the SEO impact of website downtime
If the website is closed for more than a few days, whether it is planned or unplanned, it will not be able to prevent the negative impact on search rankings.
Mueller said:
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“I don’t think you can do it during that time, no matter what you set. For outages of about a day or so, using the 503 result code is a good way to tell us that we should come back and check. But a few days later we thought it was a permanent The result code, we think your pages have just disappeared, and we will remove them from the index.
When the page returns, we will crawl them again and try to index them again. But basically during that time, we may delete many pages on the site from our index, and it is very likely that it will be returned in a similar manner, but it is not always guaranteed. “
A key takeaway here is that the effects of extended downtime will last longer than downtime.
Your pages will not return immediately, and when they return, search rankings will fluctuate sharply before things stabilize.
“Therefore, whenever you encounter a longer interruption, I will consider more than a few days, I will assume that there will be very strong fluctuations at least temporarily, and it will take a while to return to normal.
This is not impossible, because these things happen sometimes. However, if you can take any measures to avoid this interruption, I will try to do so. “
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What should the website do during a long power outage?
Mueller said that one way to deal with it is to set up a static version of the site that users can be directed to when the main site is closed.
However, if possible, the best way is to ensure that the power outage lasts less than a day.
“…It might be similar to setting up a static version of a website somewhere and then temporarily showing it to users. But especially if you do this in a planned way, I will try to find a way to reduce downtime if possible It’s less than a day’s approach.”
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Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:
Featured image: Taken from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, December 2021.
