Return HTTP 503 with a Retry-After header during planned site maintenance to avoid triggering deindexing
domain: developers.google.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Return HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable) for all URLs, not just the homepage, during planned downtime or maintenance windows
Add a Retry-After header (in seconds or an HTTP-date) so crawlers know roughly when to return
Keep the 503 window short, since Google treats a 503 lasting more than a couple of days as a signal the URLs may actually be gone
Avoid switching to 404/410 or a soft-404-triggering redirect during maintenance, since those tell Google the content is permanently gone
Restore normal 200 responses immediately once maintenance ends and spot-check via URL Inspection that Google sees the site as healthy again
Known gotchas
A 503 with no Retry-After is still respected short-term, but Google explicitly recommends including it to set expectations precisely
Prolonged 503 status can lead Google to actually remove the affected URLs from the index, not just pause crawling temporarily
Some CDN/WAF maintenance modes return a 200-status error page (a soft 404) instead of a real 503 — verify the actual HTTP status code, not just the visible page
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