Google Webmaster Trend Analyst, John Mueller, stated that Google will begin to de-index web pages if your site is down for a few days. The statement was released on December 10 during a Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout.
An SEO expert named Aakash Singh, present in the live stream, asks Mueller the question. Singh asked Mueller how he could minimize the impact on search rankings if his client’s website is down for over a week.
As much as we’d like to reduce any SEO impacts a down website can have, it is simply not possible. According to Mueller, if a website is inaccessible, it will only take a few days before its web pages start to get de-indexed.
SEO Impact on Website Downtime
John Mueller explained that for a website outage of maybe a day or so, a 503 result will tell Google that they should check back and try to index the down site again after some time. But if a few days have passed and the website still leads to a 503 code, then Google’s algorithm will automatically think that the pages are gone. This will lead them to drop the pages from their index.
But once the pages are back, Google will crawl them again and try to index them. And it is during that time, Google will probably drop or de-index a lot of pages from the website. But there’s a good chance that the pages may come back similarly, but it is not always guaranteed.
Mueller further confirmed that the longer the website outage is, your website’s SEO status and search ranking will experience strong fluctuations. It will also take a lot more time for your rank to be back in again.
So web developers should do their best to avoid these things from happening.
What Can You Do if your Website is Down?
If your website is down, Mueller suggested setting up a static version of the site that online users can be directed to if the leading site is down.
But the best thing any web developer can do is make sure that the outage doesn’t last for a day.
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