Google Advises Against Disabling Sites During the Pandemic
Google warns businesses against disabling their websites during the COVID-19 and, instead, recommends limiting their functionality to avoid being penalized in Google Search results.
The guidance published by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller answers questions from businesses who might want to pause their online business and reduce the impact in Google Search.
"These recommendations are applicable to any business with an online presence, but particularly for those who have paused the selling of their products or services online," Mueller explained.
Limit your site's functionality
Google's recommendation is to avoid if possible to completely shut down a website even when employees work from home schedules during coronavirus lockdowns don't allow them to keep them updated.
This approach should be followed especially in cases where a company's online business is expected to pick up again according to Mueller.
Limiting a site's functionality will allow webmasters to cut down any potential Google Search negative effects stemming from the website's reduce presence for a given period of time.
Website owners and admins are advised to take one or more of the following measures rather than shutting down their sites:
• Disable the cart functionality: This is the simplest approach, which won't change anything for a site's Search visibility.
• Tell customers what's going on: Use a banner to let your customers know of the changes the business and the site are going through.
• Update the site's structured data: Keep product availability information up to date.
• Check the Merchant Center feed: Follow best practices for availability attributes listed in the Merchant Center.
• Tell Google you changed things: Ask Google to recrawl your website using sitemaps or the Search Console.
"This is the recommended approach since it minimizes any negative effects on your site's presence in Search," Mueller added.
"People can still find your products, read reviews, or add wishlists so they can purchase at a later time."
Disable sites for a very limited time only
If you can't follow the recommended approach of limiting your site's functionality to cope with the lull in orders or the decrease in update capability, there are options to reduce the impact of a full site takedown.
"This is an extreme measure that should only be taken for a very short period of time (a few days at most), as it will otherwise have significant effects on the website in Search, even when implemented properly," Mueller explained.
"Keep in mind that your customers may also want to find information about your products, your services, and your company, even if you're not selling anything right now."
Here are the options you have in this situation:
• To urgently disable the site for 1-2 days: return an informational error page with a 503 HTTP result code instead of all content. Make sure to follow the best practices for disabling a site.
• To disable the site for a longer time: provide an indexable homepage as a placeholder for users to find in Search by using the 200 HTTP status code.
• To quickly need to hide your site in Search (while considering the options): temporarily remove it from Search.
Side effects after disabling sites
Among the side effects resulting from disabling your site, webmasters will notice Knowledge Panels losing information, Search Console verification fails, and loss of business info in Search results.
Customers will also have trouble finding first-hand accurate information in Google Search and will need to rely on info from third-party web resources.
To top it all off, once a website goes down without notification customers will not know the reason why it happened without prior warning.
Webmasters can also tell Google to crawl their sites less frequently via Search Console during limited functionality but shouldn't block any specific region from accessing their online businesses temporarily or otherwise.
"We hope that with this information, you're able to have your online business up & running quickly when that time comes," Mueller concluded.
"Should you run into any problems or questions along the way, please don't hesitate to use our public channels to get help."
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