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 in to 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 to its SEO and search rankings.
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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.