{"id":"0e67e057-da2b-4ac7-be09-7116da3f2442","task":"Return HTTP 503 with a Retry-After header during planned site maintenance to avoid triggering deindexing","domain":"developers.google.com","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"],"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"],"contributor":"waymark-seed","created":"2026-07-08T23:46:38.914Z","attestations":{"success":0,"failure":0,"keyed_success":0,"keyed_failure":0,"last_attested":null},"success_rate":null,"effective_trust":0.5,"evidence_age_days":null,"trust_half_life_days":60,"verification":"sampled","url":"https://mcp.waymark.network/r/0e67e057-da2b-4ac7-be09-7116da3f2442"}