Google de-indexes pages if the site is down for several days

Google will start de-indexing your pages from search results if your website has more than a few days of downtime.

This is explained by Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller during Google Search Central’s SEO office hours hangout recorded on December 10th.

An SEO named Aakash Singh called the livestream to ask Mueller how he can minimize the impact on search ranking while his client’s website is down for over a week.

Unfortunately, it is not possible for Singh and his clients to deactivate a website for a week without negatively affecting their SEO and search rankings.

When a website’s pages are inaccessible, it only takes a few days for them to be de-indexed, says Müller.

Mueller goes on to suggest an alternate method of managing planned downtime, but that still doesn’t guarantee that no damage will be done in the short term.

Read his full answer in the section below.

Google’s John Mueller on the SEO impact of website downtime

If a website is offline for more than a few days, whether planned or unplanned, negative effects on the search ranking cannot be prevented.

Müller says:

“I don’t think you’ll be able to make it for this time, no matter what you set up. In the event of a failure of maybe a day or so, using a 503 result code is a great way to let us know that we should look again. But after a few days we think this is permanent result code and we think your pages are just gone and we are going to remove them from the index.

And when the pages come back we’ll crawl them again and try to index them again. But essentially during this time we’ll likely be removing a lot of the site’s pages from our index, and there’s a pretty good chance it will come back in a similar fashion, but it’s not always guaranteed. “

A key takeaway here is that the effects of extended downtime last longer than the duration of the downtime.

Your pages won’t come back right away, and if they do, there will be a huge fluctuation in search rankings before things have settled down.

“So if you have an extended outage that I think more than a few days, I assume that you will have really strong fluctuations, at least temporarily, and that it will be a while before you get back on the road.

It’s not impossible because these things happen sometimes. But if there is something you can do to avoid such a failure, I would give it a try. “

What should a website do during an extended downtime?

One way to handle this is to set up a static version of the site that users can be directed to while the main page is down.

However, if possible, you should ensure that the outage lasts less than a day.

“… it could be like setting up a static version of the website somewhere and just showing it to users for the time being. But above all, if you do this in a planned manner, I would try to find ways to reduce the downtime to less than a day if possible. “

Hear Mueller’s full answer in the video below:

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Featured image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, December 2021.