503 errors - how are they handled these days?

[micklearn]

Can the "503 Service Unavailable" error message be fatal to a site's rankings even if it has only occured on a portion of a site for an extended period of time?

It was happening on a section of a site for about 10 months, on approximately 10 percent of the roughly 1000 total pages.

Those 10 percent of pages were removed via the URL removal tool and now return a 404. Would a 410 response been more ideal?

[lucy24]

Would a 410 response been more ideal?

A 410 makes the googlebot stop crawling faster. It doesn't seem to make any difference to That Other Search Engine, whose crawl budget is differently allocated. Officially 404 vs 410 makes no difference to indexing; a 410 by itself doesn't lead to instant removal from the index.

Please say you didn't mean that for 10 months, 100 URLs always returned a 503. A 500-class error is probably the worst response for search-engine purposes, because they have no idea what's going on. Did everyone get a 503, or was there some horrible glitch so only the googlebot met this response?

Were the 100 pages removed from the index before or after they started returning a 503?

:: vague mental association with locking barn door ::

[micklearn]

Thanks for the response, lucy24...these 100 URLs were orphaned pages...free RSS feeds where internal site links to them were removed two years ago and those URLs never had any incoming links from other sites.

The company providing the free RSS feeds stopped doing that 10 months ago and started charging for the feeds. The pages with the RSS widgets stopped loading, hence the 503.

Unfortunately, this site received no notification from that company that they were discontinuing the free RSS on page feeds and the site was serving all of those orphaned 100 URLs as 503's for anyone/bot who might have visited them over the last 10 months.

The URLs were removed via GWT months ago, but I'm wondering if the 503's killed the indexing/rankings.