PLAYBOOK: The 72-hour merchant feed shutdown drill

PLAYBOOK: The 72-hour merchant feed shutdown drill
Filed 09:14 ET. When a merchant kills its product/coupon feed, the clock starts and ranking pages rot fast. Here's the runbook operators we trust actually use:
— Hour 0: pull the dead feed URL from your scheduler logs, confirm it's 404/410 not a temporary 503 before touching live pages
— Hour 0-2: freeze the merchant's coupon template, swap expired codes to noindex not delete, so you keep crawl equity
— Hour 2-24: scrape the merchant's own /promo and email footer for surviving offers, repopulate manually
— Hour 24-72: file with the network for the replacement feed ID; most issue a new one within two business days
Why it matters: teams that delete instead of noindex lose the page's earned position and re-rank from zero when the merchant returns. Developing...