What The Government Shutdown Means For .gov SEO

As part of the US government shut down , many .gov
sites have also shut down, replaced by messages like
this:
“Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this
website is not available. We sincerely regret this
inconvenience.”
But one day, the government will start up again and
government agencies will once again focus on ensuring
that the information their sites provide is easily
available to US citizens.
We know that Americans primarily use search to
access government information, so once the shutdown
is over, it won’t be enough that the web sites power
up. They also need to be indexed and ranking in
search engines such as Bing and Google for relevant
queries.
And that may take a while.
The .gov sites that have shut down have done so in
one of two ways:
The page content is replaced by an unavailable
message. The URLs remain the same and return a 200
status code.
The pages 302 redirect to a different page that
contains the unavailable message (and that second
page returns a 200 status code).
Both scenarios result in the same outcome from an
SEO perspective: the original URL remains indexed,
but with the contents of the unavailable message. All of
the context of what the pages are about will be lost
and the only relevance clues will come from links to
those pages.  That means that as the pages are
recrawled they may stop ranking entirely for some
queries and will rank lower for others.
That’s fine during the shutdown, since the pages
aren’t available anyway, but once the sites are live
again, it will take some time before the search engines
recrawl the pages (think of the thousands and
thousands of pages most .gov web sites contain) and
the rankings return.
Let’s take a closer look at why this happens. (And of
course, I’m not positive that this will in fact happen
for .gov sites. The search engines are certainly aware
of this situation and may implement special handling,
such as pausing .gov site crawls and leaving the
previous versions of the pages in the index during the
shutdown.)
Scenario 1: Modified Page Content
In this scenario, the page content is replaced by an
unavailable message and the pages return a 200
response code. You can see this, for instance, with
www.census.gov .
All pages on the site contain the following content: