Next week the High Holy Days begin for the Jewish people and some of us will be offline (I will be offline) and some more righteous folks actually disable functionally, like checkout processes, on their sites on the holidays and even on Shabbat (Saturday).
With these days approaching, John Mueller of Google reshared some tips on how to temporarily close your site on specific days.
As a reminder, we've talked a lot about sites that close down once a week or more for religious purposes, specifically closing on Shabbat. We were concerned about how GoogleBot handles it, will rankings drop and what about sites that show interstitials as a message to their customers about being closed, will they be hit by the penalty? Google more recently shared site closing tips and and added documentation on pausing a site with having the least harm to your SEO.
Now, John shared a Twitter thread summarizing a lot of this older advice:
(just kidding on the "5 things", I didn't plan this tweet thread ahead of time, we'll see how long it gets. Yes, a rogue tweet-thread.) More in the next tweet, but here's a link if you hate threads: https://t.co/3fK9KknRBK
β π½γlink href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical γπ½ (@JohnMu) September 19, 2022
A 503 tells "robots" that the page currently isn't available. They'll check back again. *However,* it's a temporary status (more in a bit).
β π½γlink href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical γπ½ (@JohnMu) September 19, 2022
Why should the robots.txt be 404 or 200? If it's served with a 503, robots will assume the site is fully blocked by robots.txt (for a while). This is a bad idea.
β π½γlink href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical γπ½ (@JohnMu) September 19, 2022
4. I ran out of things, but promised 5 items. Hmm.. What if a site wants to close for >1 day? There will be negative effects no matter the option you choose (503, blocked, noindex, 404, 403) - pages are likely to drop out of the search results.
β π½γlink href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical γπ½ (@JohnMu) September 19, 2022
So, how can you help these websites? Check the status codes. If they're wrong, contact the site owner to let them know. Note: websites get emails from SEOs all the time telling them their site is bad, so please be reasonable in your message.
β π½γlink href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical γπ½ (@JohnMu) September 19, 2022
(Note: you can't check other people's data, so this is something the site-owner has to do.) ... Then, take the URLs individually, hover over them, and click the magnifying glass ("inspect URL"). This checks the indexation status of the page. pic.twitter.com/5beqOdo8Lh
β π½γlink href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical γπ½ (@JohnMu) September 19, 2022
Just to repeat: Google won't index all pages, this is normal and expected.
β π½γlink href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical γπ½ (@JohnMu) September 19, 2022
So in short: check the status codes, recommend a 503, but limit closure to a day ideally. Afterwards, show the site-owner how they can submit things for reindexing if needed. Also, give it 1-2 weeks to settle down regardless. That's all! Keep calm and SEO on.
β π½γlink href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical γπ½ (@JohnMu) September 19, 2022
Forum discussion at Twitter.
