An SEO professional was concerned about their website, which was hit by a technical problem. John suggested serving a 503 error code.
Their main question was: for their site, which averaged about 200,000 sessions a day, it was hit by a technical problem and the site was down for 14 to 15 hours just two days ago.
Yesterday’s traffic was roughly normal. The next day, many of their pages went missing from Google searches.
The site has been stable for approximately 8 years now, and they have never had a problem like that before.
What do you recommend?
John answered that usually, if you have this kind of technical issue for a short period of time, it’s possible that what could happen is that these pages will drop out of their index.
However, they will usually pop back in quickly.
What typically happens is that the pages which Google crawled more often will likely get picked up first, and be noticed during the time of this technical issue. Perhaps Google dropped them during that time.
The SEO professional should see that reflected in their traffic as well.
The good news is that these pages tend to also be recrawled fairly frequently, so they should pop back in frequently, or quickly after the technical issue period lapses.
The best way to protect against issues occurring during these kinds of issues is to ensure that you have some sort of server system in place that can serve a 503 result code when things go wrong.
It’s possible that it doesn’t trigger automatically. Even if you can manually turn the 503 result code on, essentially, what happens then is when Google crawls the pages during that time and see the 503, then they will say “Oh, there’s a problem here. We will come back later to double check.”
Basically, the 503 is code for telling Google that this is just a technical glitch.
This happens at approximately the 34:25 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 34:25
My website, averaging around 200,000 sessions a day, was hit by technical problem and the site was down for 14 to 15 hours just two days ago. While yesterday’s traffic was roughly normal, today, a lot of our pages have gone missing from Google searches. The site has been stable for eight years. We’ve never had a problem like this before. What do you recommend?
John (Answer) 34:50
So usually, if you have this kind of technical issue for a short period of time, it can happen that these pages will drop out of our index. And usually they will pop back in fairly quickly as well. So what usually happens is the pages that we crawl more often probably get picked up first and get noticed during this technical issue, and maybe we drop them during that time.
So you’ll probably see that reflected in your traffic as well. But the good news is that these pages tend also to be recrawled fairly frequently, so they should pop back in fairly frequently, or fairly quickly afterwards.
The best way to protect against this kind of issue is to make sure that you have some system in place that can serve a 503 result code when things go wrong. And it might be that it doesn’t trigger automatically. But even if you can manually turn this 503 result code on, essentially, what happens then is when we crawl the pages during that time and see the 503, then we will say oh, there’s a problem here, we will ignore it and come back later to double check.
And essentially, if you can serve a 503 result code, then for a period of like a day or two, then we will just see that as a temporary glitch. And we will not drop these pages from our index because we think that they still exist. Whereas if you serve a 404, or if you serve an empty page or just an error page directly, then we might assume that this page has actually gone and we’ll drop it from the index. So that would kind of be my recommendation.
Oftentimes, you can’t just jump in when things go down and suddenly figure out how to do a 503. So I would just prepare that kind of a system ahead of time so that you can switch over as quickly as possible, should you notice that something like this has happened. And if you can serve a 503 for a day or two, then you should not see any, any changes in your search indexing at all. If it’s longer, then obviously you could still, but at least for those one day or two, you kind of protect it.
And in the case that you can’t do that, like you did here. I would assume that this will just come back automatically. I don’t think there’s anything manual that you need to do. We will recrawl these pages, we’ll notice there’s good content there again, we’ll index them again, we’ll kind of pick up the signals that we had before. It should essentially be indexed and rank similarly to before. There should not be any long term issue here.
