8.8 C
New York
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Buy now

spot_img

Google Recommends Ways to Pause Businesses in Search During COVID-19 Pandemic

Google is providing guidance to businesses who wish to pause their online activity as the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow.

These recommendations are geared toward helping businesses pause online activity while minimizing the impact on search rankings.

Google says this advice is applicable to any business with an online presence, though it’s especially relevant for those who have temporarily stopped offering products or services online.

Here’s What Google Recommends

If your business hasn’t permanently closed, and there are plans to eventually reopen, then Google recommends keeping your site online and limiting the functionality.

You can do this by marking items as out of stock or restricting the cart and checkout process.

Google recommends taking this approach because it minimizes any negative effects on a site’s presence in search results.

Here’s a full set of action items:

  • Disable the cart: This is the easiest way to pause business activity without any impact to a site’s visibility in search results.
  • Inform your customers: Make sure customers are aware of what’s going on with your business by displaying a banner with the appropriate information.
  • Update structured data: Adjust the structured data for things such as products, books, and events to reflect their current status (out of stock, cancelled, etc.)
  • Check your Merchant Center feed: If you use Merchant Center, follow the best practices for the availability attribute.
  • Inform Google: Use Search Console or sitemaps to ask Google to recrawl your pages and display the latest information.

Here’s What Google Does Not Recommend

Google explicitly does not recommend disabling your whole site.

“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.”

Instead, limit your site’s functionality as this will ensure both Google and customers know your business is still around.

Customers may still want to browse and read about products they intend to buy later.

However, if you decide to go against Google’s recommendations and disable your site, here are some options:

  • Return an informational error page with a 503 HTTP result code if you need to urgently disable the site for 1-2 days.
  • Provide an indexable page as a placeholder if you need to disable the site for a period of time longer than 1-2 days.
  • If you quickly need to hide your site while you think about what to do next, you can temporarily remove it from search results using Search Console.

For further guidance, see Google’s blog post here.

FAQ

What if I only disable my site for a few weeks?

Disabling a site even for just a few weeks can have negative consequences on Google’s indexing of your site.

Can I just remove all non-essential products and services from my site?

Yes, that is fine.

Can I ask Google to crawl less during this time?

Yes, you can limit crawling with Search Console, though it may impact the freshness of your search results.

Can I block a specific region from accessing my site?

Google does not recommend that you block an entire region from temporarily accessing your site.





Source link

0 0 votes
Article Rating
SEO News
SEO News
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.

Related Articles

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Stay Connected

0FansLike
3,912FollowersFollow
0SubscribersSubscribe
- Advertisement -spot_img

Latest Articles