We know that Google recommends using a 503 server status code for your your website goes offline or down temporarily for less than a day (hours not multiple days). But what if you know your site will be offline for days? John Mueller of Google said try to see if you can upload a static, HTML and temporary version of your site and/or most important web pages.

John said on Twitter “For longer outages, if search is critical for your site, I’d recommend setting up a temporary, static version of your important pages. This helps to keep pages indexed.”

If you are planning this, it would be easy to save your web pages as HTML but if the site goes offline in an unplanned event then you need to likely find it on the Wayback Machine to grab a copy of the static HTML to upload to your server.

Here are John’s tweets on how to do this:

Just one side note; Google won’t penalize you for cloaking if you use a 503 for Googlebot in these extreme situations:

Forum discussion at Twitter.