SEJ Shares Five Ways To Prepare For Site Closure
Closing a site indicates that the site is no longer in use and can eventually be deleted according to a schedule.
Search Engine Journal contributor Matt G. Southern has shared five ways to prepare for a site closure.
He says, “More detail about these recommendations and how to deal with the negative impact of taking a site offline is explained in the following sections.
1. HTTP 503 Status Code
When taking a website offline, ensure it serves an HTTP 503 status code to web crawlers.
When web crawlers like Googlebot encounter a 503 status code, they understand the site is unavailable and may become available later.
With a 503 code, crawlers know to check on the site again rather than drop it from Google’s search index.”
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