CoronavirusMany website owners will have seen changes to your business over the last 10 days since the Coronavirus became a pandemic. The governments measures and the changes in public behaviour mean that some businesses will have to make changes to the way they operate, including closing temporarily.

Google Webmasters Blog has just issued some guidance on what business website owners should do during this period of time. You can read the article by Google here.

This guidance is really important because if you take the wrong course of action during the Coronavirus pandemic, your website could suffer in the longer term when it comes to search rankings.

In summary, Google recommends that you do not close down your website completely, even if it is for a few weeks, as this will impact the way Google indexes your sites pages. Instead, it offers guidance on how to make adjustments. Here are a few of Google’s recommendations, along with some of my own…

  • Disabling shopping cart functionality
  • Displaying messages to keep your audience informed
  • Changing business hours
  • Limiting products
  • Letting customers know about changes to deliveries
  • Disable bookings/appointment functionality
  • Update your structured data
  • Ask Google to crawl your updated pages

We are here to help wherever we can, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Thanks for reading,

Dan @ Go Web