If your site has been offline for more than a couple of days, Google will begin to deindex your web pages from search results.
On December 10, Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller mentioned this during the Google Search Central search engine marketing office-hours chat.
Aakash Singh, a search engine marketing consultant, called into the live broadcast to question Mueller whether he could minimize the impact on search results while his client’s website has been offline for almost a week.
Regrettably, it is impossible for Singh and his customers to keep a website offline for a week without affecting its search engine optimization and ranks. If a website’s pages become unavailable. Mueller claims that it will only be a handful of days until they are deindexed.
Mueller goes on to suggest an alternative method for dealing with planned downtime. But it still doesn’t guarantee that no harm will be done in the short time frame.
See also: Google Will Not Set a Date For Mobile-First Index
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Google’s John Mueller On The Search Engine Marketing Influence Of Website Downtime
John claims that no matter whatever they plan, they will not be allowed to do it at that time. A 503 result signal is an excellent approach to tell Google that they must repeatedly check in the event of a short downtime, such as a day or two.
However, this can become a perpetual result code after a couple of days. John anticipates that one’s web pages will just expire, and Google will remove them from the index.
When the web pages return, they’ll scan them once more and seek to index them. The impact of lengthy downtime will linger longer than the duration of the outage, which is an important point.
Your web pages will not return quickly. And when they do, there could be significant changes in search ranks before things settle down. So, if you have a prolonged downtime, perhaps more than a couple of days. John says you’ll see really strong fluctuations, and it’ll take a while to get the index back.
It’s not unthinkable because these things happen all the time. However, John advises that you must try it if there is anything you can do to avoid such an outage.
See also: Valuable Tips For Sites Getting Indexed By John Mueller
What Should A Website Do In The Event Of A Lengthy Outage?
One solution, Mueller says, is to create a static version of the placement that clients may be sent to if the main website is unavailable. The most beneficial thing to do, if possible, is to keep the outage to less than a day.