In order to try to mitigate the risk of the pandemic due to Coronavirus by global destruction, Google has released a set of recommendations and a supportive FAQ to website operators.
The business claims that the most valuable recommendation to ensure that a domain is not completely deactivated as long as hosting costs can continue to be charged. Some domain registrars, such as GoDaddy and Namecheap, offer assistance to impacted customers, who are unable to manage shutdown websites. Nevertheless, Google claims that removing a website could impact its search results when it is restored online.
“We suggest keeping you on-line and limiting your access if your condition is transient and you want to restart your online business,” says Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller. “For example, the cart and checkout process may be labeled out of stock or limited. It is the strategy that is preferred because it minimizes the adverse impacts on the hunt for the website. People are always able to find the items, read comments or add wishlists so that they can purchase them later.
Mueller proposes that a website owner should then remove the shopping cart, post a banner or some other form of info on the internet to inform clients of restricted features and that the search engine could re-index a small number of sites by using the Google Search Console tool.
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Mueller suggests a final option would be to uninstall a website. “This is an incredibly long-term step (some days at most) to take because it will otherwise have a huge effect on the website in quest even if correctly applied,” he says. “Which is why you are strongly encouraged to restrict the use of your website only. Please be mindful that even though you are not selling anything right now, your clients may want to find details about their goods, your services, and your business.
However, if possible, Mueller says that there are steps to minimize the permanent harm which the site can suffer from:
If you desperately need to deactivate the website for 1-2 days, return a 503 HTTP result code details mistake, rather than any text. Please follow the best practices to deactivate a site.
When you have to turn off the web for a longer period, you can use a 200 HTTP status code to include a temporary indexable homepage for users to search for.
You can temporarily remove your site from Search if you need to quickly cover your site in Search, considering all options.
