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Google reminds sites to serve 503 status codes during PHP maintenance to avoid losing indexed URLs

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TLDR

Google advises serving 503 status codes from outside PHP during patches and keeping robots.txt accessible to prevent URLs from being dropped from the index.

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Optimixed's original report on this story.

Google reminded site operators that when taking infrastructure offline for PHP patching, they should serve 503 (Service Unavailable) responses from outside the PHP layer itself and ensure robots.txt remains reachable. Failure to do so can result in indexed URLs being dropped after prolonged server errors.

Topics:SEO News & Algorithm Updates
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