If your website is unavailable for more than a few days, Google will begin to remove your pages from search results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was stated by Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout on December 10th.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aakash Singh, an SEO, joined Livestream to ask Mueller how he can reduce the impact on search rankings while his client’s website is down for more than a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately for Singh and his client, taking a website offline for a week will harm its SEO and search rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mueller claims that if a website’s pages become inaccessible, they will be de-indexed in a matter of days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read Google Says No Penalty For Using Affiliate Links Without Markup<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mueller then suggests a different approach to dealing with planned downtime, but this does not guarantee that no harm will be done in the short term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can read his entire response in the section below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If a website is down for more than a few days, whether planned or unplanned, it will be impossible to avoid negative effects on search rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mueller states:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI don\u2019t think you\u2019ll be able to do it for that time, regardless of whatever you set up. For 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. 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.<\/p> 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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The key takeaway here is that the impact of prolonged downtime will outlast the outage itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your pages will not reappear immediately, and when they do, there will be significant fluctuations in search rankings before things stabilize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Try free Plagiarism Checker<\/a>, Paraphrasing Tool<\/a>, and Website Reviewer<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo any 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.<\/p> 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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n What should a website do if it is unavailable for an extended period of time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mueller suggests creating a static version of the site to which users can be directed if the main site is down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, if at all possible, keep the outage to no more than a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2026 that 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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Hear Mueller\u2019s full response in the video below:<\/p>\n\n\n\nJohn Mueller of Google discusses the SEO Implications of Website Downtime<\/h2>\n\n\n\n