Government Shut Down Impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A shut down of US Government as impacted many US .gov sites where we can easily see a message being populated “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available. We sincerely regret this inconvenience.”
What exactly does US Government shutdown mean?
As per Wikipedia "On October 1, 2013, the United States federal government entered a shutdown suspending discretionary services deemed "non-excepted" by the Anti-deficiency Act. Because of the government's failure to enact regular appropriations or a continuing resolution for the 2014 fiscal year, appropriations have lapsed and about 800,000 federal employees were indefinitely furloughed
without pay, while another 1.3 million "excepted" employees were
required to report to work indefinitely without pay until a budget is
passed."
US government has experience similar situation in year 1995-96.
But as we all know that this situation is not a permanent one and one day all issues will be resolved. Once US government is on track all the .gov sites will again start providing useful and informative information to audience looking for that.
Again for .gov websites there is one issue that once those sites are back it will take time to get crawled and indexed by search engines like Bing and Google.
For such sites, there can be two different solutions :
1) Place a 404 Page : .gov sites should place a 404 error page having a message stating "Page you are looking for is not available"
2) 302 Redirection : .gov sites can place 302 temporary redirection as well, which will redirect users to home page or error message page.
By implementing above two methods webmasters can ensure that previous URL's will remain the same and they will not lose their audience.
Get more information on Search Engine Land .
