A 5xx spike costs you crawl rate for weeks, not hours

A 5xx spike costs you crawl rate for weeks, not hours

Googlebot reads sustained 5xx as "back off." In 17 incident post-mortems, a 6-hour 5xx episode (median 8% of responses) cut daily crawl volume that didn't fully recover for a while.

— day 0 (incident): crawl ↓41% ▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░
— day 3: still ↓28% ▓▓▓▓░░░░░░
— day 7: ↓12% ▓▓░░░░░░░░
— day 14: ↓3% (baseline) ░░░░░░░░░░

Median full-recovery time: 11 days from a single bad afternoon.

So what: serve 503 with Retry-After during planned downtime, never naked 500s. And monitor 5xx rate as a leading indicator — by the time rankings dip, the crawl pullback already happened a week earlier.