Unlock and Access Your Most Valuable SEO Data
Replace (not provided) with ALL of your organic keywords inside of Adobe & Google Analytics. Analyze performance by 400+ dimensions and metrics.
Are you planning to close your website for a day or longer? According to advice from Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller, here are five ways to prepare.
Mueller shares this advice in tweets while linking to relevant Google help pages.
Spoiler alert — there’s no good way to close a website temporarily. You should avoid doing it if at all possible.
However, there are things you can do to keep the negative impact to a minimum.
Mueller’s recommendations include:
- Use HTTP 503 status code
- Keep HTTP 503 up for no longer than a day
- Change robots.txt file to return 200 status code
- Prepare for consequences if the site is down longer than a day
- Expect reduced crawling from Googlebot
More detail about these recommendations and how to deal with the negative impact of taking a site offline is explained in the following sections.
1. HTTP 503 Status Code
When taking a website offline, ensure it serves an HTTP 503 status code to web crawlers.
When web crawlers like Googlebot encounter a 503 status code, they understand the site is unavailable and may become available later.
With a 503 code, crawlers know to check on the site again rather than drop it from Google’s search index.
Mueller explains how to check for a 503 status code using Chrome:
1. They should use HTTP 503 for the...
Read Full Story: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-ways-to-prepare-for-site-closure/464936/
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.
