Answer planned maintenance and short outages with 503, for a day or two at most

5xx and 429 responses make Google slow down temporarily and keep already indexed URLs for a while, but URLs that keep failing are eventually dropped. A 200 "we'll be back soon" page becomes a soft 404 or replaces your content in the index, and a 404 removes the URLs. Google's crawl rate guide says crawling picks up again automatically once the errors drop. Said at Search Central Live (October 2026): Google lowers a site's crawl capacity within about four hours of a burst of 500 errors, while increases take one to three weeks, so a botched maintenance window can cost weeks of crawling.

During maintenance return 503 for every page (Retry-After is optional standard HTTP), keep robots.txt answering normally, and limit the 503 period to one or two days. For a longer pause keep the site online with reduced functionality, for example a disabled cart and an information banner, and update Product markup to the real availability. Use 503 or 429 only for genuine outages or overload, never as a permanent throttle.

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