There are times when the website(s) is taken down due to ongoing site maintenance, or legal or cultural requirements. Google says - " Outages that are not clearly marked as such can negatively affect a site’s reputation . " In that scenario due to the ongoing site maintenance, or legal or cultural requirements, there are methods to deal with the planned website downtime in a way that will generally not negatively affect your site’s visibility in the search results. How to avoid the negative impact on website's visibility during the 'Planned Site Downtime' in Google Search Results? Instead of returning a 404 Not Found HTTP result code or showing an error page with the status code 200 (OK) when a page is requested, it’s better to return a 503 HTTP result code (Service Unavailable) which tells search engine crawlers that the downtime is temporary. Moreover, it allows webmasters to provide visitors and bots with an estimated time when the site will be up ...