Searchers who expect a website to be always available may be disappointed when they encounter a 503 status code.
However, a short period of downtime is perfectly fine.
During the April edition of Google Search Central SEO Office Hours, we received a question about the potential impact of providing a 503 “Service Unavailable” status code intermittently.
Gary Illyes, a longtime webmaster trends analyst at Google, made the search engine's position clear.
“Serving a 503 status code for an extended period of time will reduce your crawl rate.
Luckily, the occasional 10-15 minutes doesn't “extend” so you'll be fine. ”
The importance of uptime
While 100% uptime may be ideal, it is not required to maintain good rankings in Google search results.
The website undergoes regular maintenance and updates and unplanned outages may occur.
As long as such downtime is short and infrequent, it is unlikely to seriously impact crawling or indexing.
Extension periods were not clearly defined, but instances of 10-15 minute periods several times a week were considered acceptable.
Google previously said it would begin de-indexing web pages if a site is down for more than a few days.
Planning for updates
Advanced planning and strategies are recommended for websites that expect extended downtime.
Techniques such as shadowing staging sites and employing progressive rollouts can reduce the visibility of errors and downtime.
Illies advises:
“If you follow the manual, the website can be resolved and the actual downtime will be minimal. [configuration] It must not negatively impact your page's ranking in Google search results. ”
While continuous uptime is ideal for user experience, Google's system can tolerate short periods of downtime without negatively ranking your website in search results.
Why SEJ is paying attention
Google's guidance on concise 503 status codes should reassure publishers concerned about the potential negative impact of website downtime.
Many sites run regular update cycles on a weekly or monthly basis and require some downtime.
These can be used to publish new content, product updates, security patches, and general housekeeping.
Additionally, unplanned outages, server issues, and other unavoidable downtime occur.
As long as temporary blips are proactively resolved, there's no need to panic about losing rankings or search visibility.
How this helps
Website owners, developers, and SEO professionals who manage their websites can benefit from understanding Google's tolerance for 503 status codes.
Some important points:
- Plan for and minimize downtime during updates, but don't stress about servicing your 503 in a short period of time.
- Monitor analytics and user feedback to ensure that users are not severely impacted by periods of unavailability.
- Uptime and quick error resolution should be prioritized as much as possible for the overall health of your website.
- Consider techniques such as phased rollouts to reduce failures for major updates that require extended downtime.
The reasonable expectations set by Google allow websites to make informed decisions about balancing downtime and SEO priorities.
You can watch the full questions and answers in the video below.
Featured image: Zikku Creative/Shutterstock