Google will begin to deindex your pages from search results if your website experiences more than a couple of days of downtime.

This is stated by Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout recorded on December 10.

An SEO named Aakash Singh called into the Livestream to ask Mueller how he can minimize the impact on search rankings while his client’s website is down for over a week.

Unfortunately for Singh and his client, it’s not possible to take a website down for a week without any negative impact on its SEO and search rankings.

If a website’s pages become inaccessible then it will only take a matter of days before they start to get de-indexed, Mueller says.

Mueller goes on to suggest an alternative method for handling planned downtime, but it still doesn’t guarantee no harm will be done in the short term.

Read his full response in the section below.

Google’s John Mueller On The SEO Impact Of Website Downtime

If a website is down for longer than a few days, whether it’s planned or unplanned, it won’t be possible to prevent negative effects on search rankings.

What should a website do during an extended outage?

One way to handle it, Mueller says, is to set up a static version of the site that users can be directed to while the main site is down.

If possible, however, the best thing to do is make sure the outage lasts for less than a day. To Rank #1 in Google, you can hire a digital marketing company in Canada.

Source: Search Engine Journal