{"id":2046,"date":"2021-12-13T09:13:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-13T09:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seopolarity.com\/blog\/?p=2046"},"modified":"2021-12-13T19:22:44","modified_gmt":"2021-12-13T19:22:44","slug":"google-will-deindex-pages-if-site-is-down-for-several-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seopolarity.com\/blog\/google-will-deindex-pages-if-site-is-down-for-several-days\/2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Will Deindex Pages If Site Is Down For Several Days"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If your website is down for more than a couple of days, Google will begin to deindex your pages from search results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was stated by Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller during the December 10 Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aakash Singh, an SEO, joined Livestream to ask Mueller how he can minimize the impact on search rankings while his client’s website is offline for more than a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately for Singh and his client, taking a website offline for a week will have a negative impact on its SEO and search rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mueller claims that if a website’s pages become inaccessible, it will only be a matter of days before they are de-indexed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read Are .gov Links Considered a Google Ranking Factor?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mueller then suggests an alternative method for dealing with planned downtime, but this does not guarantee that no harm will be done in the short term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the section below, you can read his complete response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google’s John Mueller Discusses the SEO Implications of Website Downtime<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It will be impossible to avoid negative effects on search rankings if a website is down for more than a few days, whether planned or unplanned.<\/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 last longer than the outage itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your pages will not reappear right away, and when they do, there will be significant fluctuations in search rankings before things settle down.<\/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 goes down 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 while the main site is unavailable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, if at all possible, ensure that the outage lasts no longer 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\n

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