How to pause your business online in Google Search

Thursday, March 26, 2020

As the effects of the coronavirus grow, we’ve seen businesses around the world looking for ways
to pause their activities online. With the outlook of coming back and being present for your
customers, here’s an overview of our recommendations of how to pause your business online and
minimize impacts with Google Search. These recommendations are applicable to any business with
an online presence, but particularly for those who have paused the selling of their products
or services online. For more detailed information, also check our
developer documentation.

Recommended: limit site functionality

If your situation is temporary and you plan to reopen your online business, we recommend keeping
your site online and limiting the functionality. For example, you might mark items as out of
stock, or restrict the cart and checkout process. This is the recommended approach since it
minimizes any negative effects on your site’s presence in Search. People can still find your
products, read reviews, or add wishlists so they can purchase at a later time.

It’s also a good practice to:

• Disable the cart functionality:
  Disabling the cart functionality is the simplest approach, and doesn’t change anything for your
  site’s visibility in Search.
• Tell your customers what’s going on: Display a banner or popup div with
  appropriate information for your users, so that they’re aware of the business’s status. Mention
  any known and unusual delays, shipping times, pick-up or delivery options, etc. upfront, so
  that users continue with the right expectations. Make sure to follow our
  guidelines on popups and banners.
• Update your structured data: If your site uses structured data (such as
  Products,
  Books,
  Events), make sure to adjust it appropriately
  (reflecting the current product availability, or changing events to cancelled). If your
  business has a physical storefront, update
  Local Business structured data
  to reflect current opening hours.
• Check your Merchant Center feed: If you use Merchant Center, follow the
  best practices for the availability attribute.
• Tell Google about your updates: To ask Google to recrawl a limited number of
  pages (for example, the home page), use
  Search Console. For a larger
  number of pages (for example, all of your product pages), use
  sitemaps.

For more information, check our
developers documentation.

Not recommended: disabling the whole website

As a last resort, you may decide to disable the whole website. 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. That’s why
it’s highly recommended to only limit your site’s functionality
instead. Keep in mind that your customers may also want to find information about your products,
your services, and your company, even if you’re not selling anything right now.

If you decide that you need to do this (again, which we don’t recommend), here are some options:

• If you need to urgently disable the site for 1-2 days, then return an informational error page with a
  503 HTTP result code
  instead of all content. Make sure to follow the
  best practices
  for disabling a site.
• If you need to disable the site for a longer time, then provide an indexable home page as a
  placeholder for users to find in Search by using the 200 HTTP status code.
• If you quickly need to hide your site in Search while you consider the options, you can
  temporarily remove
  it from Search.

For more information, check our
developers documentation.

Proceed with caution: To elaborate why we don’t recommend disabling the whole
website, here are some of the side effects:

• Your customers won’t know what’s happening with your business if they can’t find your
  business online at all.
• Your customers can’t find or read first-hand information about your business and its products
  and services. For example, reviews, specs, past orders, repair guides, or manuals won’t be
  findable. Third-party information may not be as correct or comprehensive as what you can
  provide. This often also affects future purchase decisions.
• Knowledge Panels may lose information, like contact phone numbers and your site’s logo.
• Search Console verification will fail, and you will lose all access to information about your
  business in Search. Aggregate reports in Search Console will lose data as pages are dropped from the index.
• Ramping back up after a prolonged period of time will be significantly harder if your website
  needs to be reindexed first. Additionally, it’s uncertain how long this would take, and whether
  the site would appear similarly in Search afterwards.

Other things to consider

Beyond the operation of your web site, there are other actions you might want to take to pause
your online business in Google Search:

• If you hold events, look over the
  new properties for
  marking them virtual, postponed or canceled.
• Learn how to
  change your business hours
  or indicate temporary closures.
• Review the resources
  from
  Google for Small Business on how to communicate with customers and employees, for working
  remotely and modifying advertising campaigns.
• Understand how to
  recommend changes to your
  Google knowledge panel (or
  how to claim it, if you
  haven’t already).

Also be sure to keep up with the latest by following updates on Twitter at
@GoogleSearchC
and @GoogleMyBiz.

FAQs

We realize that any business closure is a big and stressful step, and not everyone will know
what to do. If you notice afterwards that you could have done something differently,
everything’s not lost: we try to make our systems robust so that your site will be back in
Search as quickly as possible. Like you, we’re hoping that this crisis finds an end as soon as
possible. We hope that with this information, you’re able to have your online business up and
running quickly when that time comes. Should you run into any problems or questions along the
way, please don’t hesitate to use our public channels
to get help.

Posted by John Mueller, working from home in Zurich, Switzerland