Taking a site offline to patch PHP? Serve a 503 from outside PHP and keep robots.txt reachable. Days of server errors may get URLs dropped.
Google Search Central is reminding anyone who takes servers offline for PHP patches to return a 503 status code, which tells Google the outage is temporary.
The LinkedIn post went up Wednesday, the day PHP released emergency fixes for two critical flaws that can let attackers run code without logging in.
The post doesn’t say how long a 503 can stay up. Google’s crawl rate documentation recommends against serving one for more than one to two days, because URLs that return it for multiple days may be dropped from the index.
“Serving a 503 (Service Unavailable) HTTP status code ensures already indexed URLs are preserved in Search while you work. Once you start serving 200 responses again, things naturally return to normal.”
The post also warned against generic 404s or 200 error pages during the downtime. It linked to Google’s page on how HTTP status codes affect its crawlers.
In a 2013 post, Google’s John Mueller wrote that returning an error page with a 200 OK status code causes Google to index that error content.
Mueller posted his own reminder on Bluesky earlier Wednesday and said where the 503 can come from:
“If you’re taking PHP sites down to schedule time to deal with “unplanned updates”, use HTTP 503 instead of letting responses time out / 404 / 500.
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