Few days back we reported that downtime can get your site deindexed by Google. This information has alarmed many webmasters and most are not happy about it. Carsten Cumbrowski at Search Engine Journal has written a post where he tries to offer a realistic solution for the same.

The first recommendation he makes is for sites that are temporarily down for maintenance.

Since Webmaster Central is now becoming more important and provides Webmasters more and more control, how about an option where the webmaster can indicate that the site undergoes maintenance and then again that the site is up again. The mechanism could be similar to the ping that is used to tell Google that an updated Site map is available. 

Moreover, webmasters are transfixed when it comes to shifting from one domain to another. He suggests that Google can provide a form so that the webmasters can inform Google in advance about the switch of domain.
He makes another suggestion which is meant for all the SE that participate in the Sitemaps.org project 

May be also an indicator in the Site map. Since all SE work on it, all SE could adapt it at the same time. Like:
<urlset …>      
…
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.old.com/d/pg.html</loc>
      <newloc>http://www.new.com/d2/pg.html</newlink>
      <datemoved>YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS</datemoved>
  </url>
…
</urlset>
Note the two new elements “newloc” and “datemoved”.

To get a better insight of Carsten's suggestions read the complete post.

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