Will the Go Daddy Outage Affect Your SEO?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in recent days will be aware that GoDaddy recently suffered an outage that left millions of its client’s websites inaccessible. While this sort of downtime will obviously affect a site’s traffic and therefore revenue, many people are asking whether it will have an effect on their SEO.

The short answer to that question is no, probably not. Google is generally not happy when they coming knocking and find that a site in their index has apparently disappeared, but they are also aware that problems occur, and so long as they don’t occur regularly then a site’s SERP ranking is unlikely to be degraded. Reliability is important, and a site that is regularly down will take a ranking hit, but a short period of unavailability is an anomaly, not a trend that is useful as a signal.

With that specific case dealt with, it might be useful to consider the more general case of downtime and how it should be handled. It’s occasionally necessary to take a site down for various reasons: making large scale changes to the software or server, for example. How are we to handle this?

If a site is going to be down for any extended period, and keeping in mind that often, planned downtime can be longer than expected (see the planning fallacy), then it is necessary to inform both the Google crawler and potential visitors. We’re all familiar with examples of downed site’s displaying amusing ‘whoops’ images like the Twitter fail whale, and sites should employ a similar tactic to let their visitors know what’s going on. New visitors are likely not to try again if they get a 404 error or their browser times out.

To let the crawler’s know that the site is temporarily down we would need to set up a 503 (service unavailable) page on the domain, which can also contain the message to visitors. Google honors 503s and will not crawl and index a page that returns a 503, but will return later. The simplest 503 contains the following code:

503.php

<?php
 header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
 header('Retry-After: Sat, 8 Oct 2011 18:27:00 GMT'); 
 ?>
 <!DOCTYPE HTML>
 <html>
 <head>

This let’s the crawler know that the site is down temporarily and to come back some time after the date in the third line. Now we just need to use the .htaccess file to redirect all traffic to this page.

.htaccess

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/503\.php$
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /503.php [L]

Of course, you would embellish 503.php to include your message to visitors and graphics. If you follow this method, then your SEO is safeguarded during the period that your site will be down.

503.php

.htaccess

Related articles