Thousands of 503 errors in GSC for pages not important to organic search - Is this a problem?

[Inevo]

Hi, folks

A client of mine now has roughly 30 000 503-errors (found in the crawl error section of GSC). This is mostly pages with limited offers and deals. The 503 error seems to occur when the offers expire, and when the page is of no use anymore. These pages are not important for organic search, but gets traffic from direct and newsletters, mostly.

My question:
Does having a high number of 503 pages reported in GSC constitute a problem in terms of organic ranking for the domain and the category and product pages (the pages that I want to rank for organically)?

If it does, what is the best course of action to mitigate the problem?

Looking excitingly forward to your answers to this

• Sigurd

[Inevo]

Hi, Andy. Thank you so much for the insights

[MattRoney]

Yeah, I'd have to say that a 404 would be far preferable. A 301 would be ideal, but it would take some bandwidth to redirect to the next-most-relevant page whenever a deal expires.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Sigurd,

A 503 seems like an odd choice in this circumstance - is this something that the eCommerce software dictates, or are there options for this?

A 503 is service unavailable and isn't something I would expect to see on a page that has expired. There are a number of alternatives depending on the product & niche. For Google to be seeing thousands of 503's might make it look like the site is having problems.

If a page really must go, then it should be a 404 / 410, or a 301 to a close alternative, but not a 503.

Are there pointers that show these are causing issues with the site's SERP's?

-Andy