One user described seeing a loss of pages from the index after a technical issue caused their website to be down for around 14 hours. John suggests that the best way to safeguard your site against outages like this is to set up a 503 rule ready for when things go wrong. That way, Google will see that the issue is temporary and will come back later to check whether it’s been resolved. Returning a 404 or another error page as the HTTP status code means that Google could interpret the outage as pages being removed permanently, which is why some pages drop so quickly out of the index if a site is down temporarily.
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