You might need to perform maintenance on your product's landing pages or plan for an outage on your site. If your product data remains active when your landing page isn't, you could end up paying for clicks when customers visit your landing page's error message. Your products could also be disapproved in Merchant Center if the landing page is crawled and returns an error.
This article explains how to submit your product data to let us know about an outage on your site, and to limit the risk of product disapprovals.
Before your landing page is unavailable
Step 1: Use Google Search Console to limit how often Google crawls your site
At least 24 hours before your landing pages become unavailable.
Caution
We don't recommend limiting Google's crawl rate if your site gets more than around a million or more visits per day. Instead, skip to step 2: disable automatic item updates.
Step 2: Disable automatic item updates
If you use automatic item updates, disable them at least 24 hours before your landing page becomes unavailable.
Step 3: Use the excluded destination attribute in your product data
If the product is available for sale but you’d like to stop showing ads for the product, use the excluded destination [excluded_destination]
attribute. Learn more about the excluded destination [excluded_destination]
attribute
Keep in mind:
- Products that are excluded from all destinations for more than 7 days will be automatically deleted.
- Don't use
out_of_stock
for the availability[availability]
attribute for products that you're no longer selling. Instead, remove any discontinued products from your product data.
[excluded_destination]
attribute.After your landing page becomes available again
When your landing page is available again, return each of the settings to their previous state.
Reset the crawl limit in Google Search Console
To make sure Google crawls your site sooner, let Google optimize the crawl rate for your site, or at least set the rate to a high limit. If your site has been offline for a while, you may notice that Google is crawling your site at a higher rate than normal.
Update the excluded destination attribute
Reset the excluded destination [excluded_destination]
attribute to include your products in the desired destinations and then re-upload your feed.