Saijo George

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friday27 Mar 2020

Google Published Some Documentation Around Ways to Pause Businesses in Search COVID-19

https://webmasters.googleblog.com

Google is providing some best practices and recommendations to businesses looking to pause online activity while minimizing the impact on rankings. 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.

Recommended: limit site functionality – If your situation is temporary and you plan to reopen your online business, we recommend keeping your site online and limiting the functionality.

  • Disable the cart functionality: Disabling the cart functionality is the simplest approach, and doesn’t change anything for your site’s visibility in Search.
  • Tell your customers what’s going on: Display a banner or popup div with appropriate information for your users, so that they’re aware of the business’s status. Mention any known and unusual delays, shipping times, pick-up or delivery options, etc. upfront, so that users continue with the right expectations. Make sure to follow our guidelines on popups and banners.
  • Update your structured data: If your site uses structured data (such as ProductsBooksEvents), make sure to adjust it appropriately (reflecting the current product availability, or changing events to cancelled). If your business has a physical storefront, update Local Business structured data to reflect current opening hours.
  • Check your Merchant Center feed: If you use Merchant Center, follow the best practices for the availability attribute.
  • Tell Google about your updates: To ask Google to recrawl a limited number of pages (for example, the homepage), use Search Console. For a larger number of pages (for example, all of your product pages), use sitemaps.

Not recommended: disabling the whole website – 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. You may lose things like Knowledge Panels may lose information, like contact phone numbers and your site’s logo, Ramping back up after a prolonged period of time will be significantly harder if your website needs to be reindexed first, etc

  • If you need to urgently disable the site for 1-2 days, then 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.
  • If you need to disable the site for a longer time, then provide an indexable homepage as a placeholder for users to find in Search by using the 200 HTTP status code.
  • If you quickly need to hide your site in Search while you consider the options, you can temporarily remove it from Search.

They also have a developer’s help documentation on the topic.

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