How to prepare your feed for scheduled website downtime

Many online businesses face website downtime at some point due to different technical issues, planned site updates or maintenance. By website downtime, we mean the period where a website is unavailable and cannot be properly accessed by users.

If you have an e-commerce site, these periods are crucial, as customers cannot see and buy your products. Furthermore, if your product data remains active in your Google Merchant Center feed when their landing page is not available, you could end up paying for clicks and driving users to a landing page where only an error message is displayed. Also, you could face product disapprovals or even Google Merchant Center account suspensions if your landing page is crawled and returns an error. As you would expect, these unnecessary disapprovals can hamper your Shopping campaign’s performance.

There are two types of website downtime: the scheduled time that takes place for site maintenance or upgrades, and the unplanned time that can happen for a variety of reasons. In this article, we share some simple steps you can follow ahead of your scheduled website downtime, so you can inform  Google sites that your website won’t be available to receive traffic for a specific period of time. This will help you prevent unnecessary disapprovals in your Google Merchant Center accounts and get your Shopping ads running again more quickly than if they'd been disapproved.

Step 1:  At least 24 hours before your planned downtime, you can use the Google Search Console to limit how often Google crawls your site. Once you limit your crawl rate, the new rate will be valid for 90 days and after these days pass, the crawl rate will revert back to the previous setting.  Learn more on how to change your Googlebot crawl rate in the Google Search Console Help Center here.

Note: If your site regularly receives more than 1 million visits per day, it is not recommended to limit the Google crawl rate. We suggest skipping this step and going straight to the next one.

Step 2: If you are using automatic item updates in Google Merchant Center, it is recommended to disable them ahead of time. To do this,  log in to your Google Merchant Center account, click the tools icon, and select ‘Automatic improvements’ under ‘Settings’. Then toggle off the ‘Automatic item updates’ and save your choice as you can see below.

Step 3: Lastly, you can add the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute to your product data in Google Merchant Center. This attribute tells the platform where you do not want your product to be shown. For example, if you add the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute with a value of ‘Shopping ads’, your products will be ineligible to appear on Shopping ads as long as the attribute is in place. Products that are excluded from showing on Shopping ads won't be reviewed for policy issues such as unavailable landing pages and should not be disapproved while you are working on them.

You can find feed rules by navigating to the Products section in the left hand side bar in your Merchant Center account and selecting the ‘feeds’ tab. Then click on the primary feed you wish to apply a rule to and select ‘feed rules’. For more information on feed rules and how to use them, check out this article.

Tip: You can also use the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute when your product is still on sale but you would like to stop displaying related Shopping ads. Bear in mind that you can add the ‘excluded_destination’ attribute either in your regular feed or by using a supplemental feed or feed rule, as you can see in the image below.