irock - 3:35 pm on Jan 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

I'm no expert, but my guess is that Google engineers have given the thought that ranking shouldn't be affected for a short while if a website goes down for whatever reasons.

Maybe a day of outage (mysql error or 404 or 503) will not affect ranking at all. When my site went down for a week last year, Google cache was missing, but my ranking remained. Though I doubt my ranks would stay should my server remain out of operation.

I confirmed that when my competition had the same problems some time ago. The competing website went down for 2 weeks, yet, rank remained.