Searchers who expect a website to always be available may be disappointed when they encounter a 503 status code.
However, a short downtime is perfectly acceptable.
During the April edition of Google Search Central SEO Office Hours, a question was raised about the potential impact of intermittent posting of 503 “Service Unavailable” status codes.
Gary Illyes, a trends analyst for Google webmasters, clarified the position of the search engine.
“Posting a 503 status code for an extended period of time will cause your crawl rate to decrease.
Lucky for you, 10-15 minutes every now and then isn’t extended in any way, so you should be fine.”
The importance of activity time
While 100% uptime may be ideal, it is not necessary to maintain a high ranking in Google search results.
The Websites undergo periods of maintenance and updates and may experience unplanned outages from time to time.
As long as these downtimes are short and infrequent, they are unlikely to seriously affect crawling and indexing.
An extended period was not clearly defined, but the example of 10-15 minute windows several times per week was considered acceptable.
Previously, Google stated that it would start deindexing web pages if a site was down for a few days.
Planning updates
Advanced planning and strategy is recommended for websites that expect extended downtime.
Techniques such as shadowing a test site or using progressive releases can reduce the visibility of bugs and downtime.
Illyes advises:
“If you do things by the book, meaning the website remains resolvable and the actual downtime is minimal, changing [configuration] it should not have a negative effect on the ranking of your pages in Google search results.”
While continuous uptime is ideal for user experience, Google’s systems can tolerate short downtimes without negatively ranking your website in search results.
Why SEJ cares
Google’s guidance on short 503 status codes provides relief to publishers who may be concerned about the potential negative impacts of website downtime.
Many sites go through regular update cycles with a weekly or monthly cadence, which require some windows of downtime.
These can be for publishing new content, product updates, security patches and general cleaning.
In addition, unplanned outages, server issues, and other unavoidable downtime occur.
As long as temporary errors are actively resolved, there’s no need to panic about losing search rankings and visibility.
How this can help you
Website owners, developers, and SEO professionals who manage websites can benefit from understanding Google’s tolerances for 503 status codes.
Some key points:
Plan and minimize downtime during updates, but don’t worry about short periods of service 503. Monitor analytics and user feedback to ensure users are not severely impacted by periods of unavailability. Uptime and quick error resolutions should be prioritized as much as possible for the overall health of the website. Investigate techniques such as phased releases to reduce errors for major updates that require extended downtime.
With reasonable expectations set by Google, websites can make informed decisions about balancing downtime with SEO priorities.
Hear the full question and answer in the video below:
Featured Image: Zikku Creative/Shutterstock
