If you’ve heard the latest update from Google, you might be worried about the state of your business website and may be considering a website maintenance plan. The company’s latest update has put the hard work that goes into maintaining your SEO at risk, and it’s to do with outages.
With Facebook, of all platforms, shutting down for an alarmingly long time in October of last year, it’s clear that any website can be victim to an outage.
So, what is this update from Google? And can anything be done to prevent the negative effects?
SEO update
In an update shared in December of last year, Google has confirmed that they will deindex web pages if the page’s site is down for more than a day.
As part of their ongoing mission to keep their search results as effective and informative as possible, Google will start to remove pages from their index if the parent site has been down for more than a couple of days.
The other side of this is that a lot of business websites will suffer the loss of their SEO efforts due to an outage. And it can happen in a matter of days.
The impact of the outage can last a lot longer than the outage itself, and businesses may have to rebuild their position in SEO from scratch.
What does Google say?
Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller has said about the updates: “I don’t think you’ll 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.
“And when the pages come back we will crawl them again and we will try to index them again. But it’s essentially during that time we will probably drop a lot of the pages from the website from our index, and there’s a pretty good chance that it’ll come back in a similar way but it’s not always guaranteed.”
What can be done about it?
If your site is suffering from an extended outage, Mueller, and by extension, Google, have a couple of suggestions.
The first is to set up a static version of your website. That way users can be directed to that site until your main site is back up.
In the meantime, you should focus on getting your site back on track and try to make sure the outage lasts less than a day.
Having a website hosting and maintenance plan can allow you, not necessarily to avoid an outage, but at least be able to handle the negative effects of one, should it occur. Completely avoiding the negative effects of an outage are impossible to secure, but you can lessen them and manage what you do get.
If you would like more advice on SEO and setting up a website maintenance plan, contact our team of experts today.
