Google has talked previously about handling pages that will be temporarily removed from the index, such as out of stock products. In the last English/Hindi Google Webmaster Office Hours, Aaseesh Marina from Google, one of the hosts of the English/Hindi office hours, was asked about pages that are expired, but could be made live again at some point in the future, and whether noindex is the best option.  And one of the solutions was rather interesting and not the typical one SEOs suggest.

It depends on the time between – like, what do you mean when you say future.  So if it is just say a month or just for three weeks, sometimes many people just do maintenance on their websites, and they take down and tell Google that there’s just server or server error requests and Google understands that it’s just temporary maintenance issues and we’ll come back and reindex the content once we can crawl it properly.

On the other hand, if it’s for a really, really long time, then it makes sense to noindex there if you don’t want those pages on index. So it depends on how long you mean when how long before those pages come back in the future.

Also, if it is product pages, like out of stock or something like that, I think it’s fine to just keep those pages in the index, we understand that if a product is out of stock, if you provide proper rich snippets and everything, it’s easier for Google to understand for when someone is searching for that.

It is the first time I have heard it recommended to use a maintenance server code for individual pages being removed for a period of time, rather than using it as a tool to tell Google when a site is actually under temporary maintenance.

The person who asked the initial question then clarified that their specific issue is for pages for events that happen only once or twice a year, since he has found that after they are removed for a lengthy period of time (6 months) that the rankings don’t recover.

This in itself isn’t surprising. Google has said before that after a duration of time, webmasters shouldn’t expect formerly removed pages to immediately rank from the old ranking factors that the page had prior to it being removed.

I don’t say you need to noindex them or anything, just say something like this page or this deal is currently no longer live, please check back in so-and-so time or something.  That is something how Google understands soft 404s, you know the page is not returning a 404 header response but based on the content we see, we understand the page doesn’t contain any content, we understand that it’s a 404 page anyway.

On the other hand, if you actually provide details of the previous page and just tell them the page is no longer live, I think it is fine to keep it in the index, there’s no reason to noindex it.

He then clarified the 404 aspect of it, and how to keep the page in the index as a useful page, versus a useless one.

If there’s no content on the page and you say this page doesn’t have any content right now, please check back in so-and-so time, Google will understand it as a soft 404.    On the other hand, if you provide details of the past deals, that could actually be useful information for the users who look for, when they come to that page they understand this deal would be up and so-and-so time, in a few months or something like that. So it’s not a completely useless page, so it’s fine to keep it in the index.

And when someone is searching for that deal, like Google understands that if we see your page and say the deal is not right, and if there are some other pages with that kind of deal live right now then we might show that page in the search results instead for a period of time.

Here is the video: