How To Take A Break From Your Website Without Losing Your Google Ranking

One of the biggest dilemmas SMBs have is taking time away from your website and worrying on whether your SERP rankings will drop as a result of it.  Face it, if you do not have full time employees dedicated to blogging you may take some days off from creating informative information for prospective customers.

Well the answer to this questions may have just been given by John Mueller who i a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google.  In the Google Webmaster Central blog post, he breaks down how SEOs and webmasters can handle site outages or closures that last for a day or longer.

Mr. Mueller offers three separate options and solutions to them.  They are the following:

1.  Block the cart functionality from the site for users- If a site only needs to block users from buying things, the simplest approach is to disable that specific functionality. In most cases, shopping cart pages can either be blocked from crawling through the robots.txt file, or blocked from indexing with a robots meta tag.
2. Always show interstitial or pop up- Webmasters may want to take the whole site offline and offer a warning.  Using an interstitial or pop-up with an explanation of why the site is not accessible will not be penalized Google interstitial penalty.  The site should use a 503 HTTP result code to make sure that Google does not index the temporary content.
3. Switch whole website off- sometimes it may be necessary to turn off your website completely.  You should first use a 503 code indicating that the service is temporarily unavailable.  Thereafter the guidance given in the situation is the following:

1. Set your DNS TTL to a low time (such as five minutes) a few days in advance.
2. Change the DNS to the temporary server’s IP address.
3. Take your main server offline once all requests go to the temporary server.
4. … your server is now offline …
5. When ready, bring your main server online again.
6. Switch DNS back to the main server’s IP address.
7. Change the DNS TTL back to normal.

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