{"id":19858,"date":"2021-12-24T10:21:38","date_gmt":"2021-12-24T10:21:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.improvemysearchranking.com\/?p=19858"},"modified":"2023-11-24T14:31:46","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T14:31:46","slug":"how-does-downtime-affect-a-websites-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.improvemysearchranking.com\/how-does-downtime-affect-a-websites-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"How Does Downtime Affect a Website\u2019s SEO?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although no one likes to see website downtime, it is not something that can be eliminated completely. Either because of poor servers or maintenance shutdown, websites can go down.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the important question is what kind of impact website downtime can have on a website\u2019s search engine performance and rankings?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Google\u2019s John Mueller recently talked about this during the December 10 Google Search Central SEO Office Hours hangout video.<\/span><\/p>\n

An SEO professional asked John Mueller how he can minimize the impact on search rankings when the client website goes down for up to a week.<\/span><\/p>\n

As John Mueller confirmed, unfortunately, there is no way to have a website down for a week and not face any negative SEO consequences. While there are ways to at least handle planned maintenance shutdown more effectively, there is never any guarantee of avoiding negative effects.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAny time you have a longer outage, where I\u2019m thinking more than a couple of days, I would assume that at least temporarily you will have really strong fluctuations, and it\u2019s going to take a little bit of time to get back in.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not impossible because these things happen sometimes. But if there\u2019s anything you can do to avoid this kind of outage, I would try to do that.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

503 Result Codes<\/b><\/h2>\n

Whether the downtime is planned maintenance shutdown or unintentional, there is a possibility of negative consequences. However, if it is a planned maintenance shutdown for a day or two, then you should inform Google with a 503 result code.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFor an outage of maybe a day or so, using a 503 result code is a great way to tell us that we should check back.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

A 503 result code can help, but even that doesn\u2019t work if the downtime is longer than usual. According to John:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c… but after a couple of days, we think this is a permanent result code, and we think your pages are just gone, and we will drop them from the index.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

And when the pages come back, we will crawl them again, and we will try to index them again. But it\u2019s essentially during that time we will probably drop a lot of the pages from the website from our index, and there\u2019s a pretty good chance that it\u2019ll come back in a similar way, but it\u2019s not always guaranteed.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Static versions<\/b><\/h2>\n

Another method is to redirect users to a static version of your website during the downtime. But for that method to work, it is important to ensure the outage lasts for less than a day.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat could be something like setting up a static version of the website somewhere and just showing that to users for the time being. But especially if you\u2019re doing this in a planned way, I would try to find ways to reduce the outage to less than a day if at all possible.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Manually indexing pages<\/b><\/h2>\n

In cases like these, it is also possible to manually ask Google to index the pages on your website that it may have deindexed during the outage. This might expedite the indexation process, but as we just learned, you will still likely feel some negative effects.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can manually submit pages for indexing the following way:<\/span><\/p>\n