Site Down Five Days

All Google Rankings Lost

[Go60Guy]

I just returned from an extended trip to find that my main site was down for five full days. I had excellent Google rankings for a wide variety of topics and key words. All these rankings have been lost. Obviously, Googlebot, which visits every day, determined that the site was no longer live.

Has anyone had experience with trying to recover from this sort of catastrophe? What can one do?

[Marcia]

I was once OUT for a whole month because of server downtime, it came right back in the next time around. Had it happen with a client site, too. They came back in about 2 months. Same rankings.

You have links from pages that get fresh-crawled?

[Symbios]

My advice.

Firstly you need to set up an alert service if your server goes down, secondly if your current host went down that long you need to send a rocket up their jacksie and find another.

Whilst I agree that us busy webmaster types need to take time out you either need to monitor your sites while you are away or get someone else to do it.

My Opinion.

On the plus side if you get the site(s) back up they will get picked up again, the real risk is that any sites linking to you spotted the outage and dropped the incoming links so apart from ditching your current host this is where you should concentrate your efforts and then think about how you protect what you built.

[Go60Guy]

I did have an alert service, but they notified me while I was away that they are no longer providing the service.

This host has been pretty reliable in the past. That said, I'm going to get a new host.

Its encouraging to hear that others have seen rankings return. Of course, the sooner the better. The site gets crawled every day, and has lots of unsolicited incoming links. My stats show daily Googlebot visits are continuing. And, I'm sure that many of the sites that link to me get daily crawls. Could this possibly hasten reinstatement of rankings?

[prairie]

If you change host, and therefore IP, there may be an extra delay in re-establishing your rankings.

[Go60Guy]

Hmmm...

[Marcia]

Oh, just thought of it! By any chance, could the server have gone down because of the hurricanes? Is it physically located in the southeast, or would there have been any power line outages that could have been the cause?

[Go60Guy]

No, its not hurricane related. The host is looking into it now. My stats show the site was down, although, they claim no other sites on the server went down.

[buckworks]

This happened to me a couple of years ago. My site was down when Googlebot came calling and I was out of the index for about six weeks. When the pages were indexed again, they ranked about the same as before. It was a frustrating interlude, but there was no lasting damage.

I'm pretty sure recovery is quicker when this sort of thing happens nowadays. Let us know how it goes!

[Go60Guy]

Hope you're right that recovery time is shorter. I'll report back, if, and when, anything happens.

[anallawalla]

I had a slightly different problem. I changed hosts and accidentally uploaded the site with a single click. Not all files in my local folder are meant to be uploaded, as they include temporary files such as .htaccess.

It was only because another site told me that they were going to delete my broken link (an award-winning resource) that I realised the problem. I had uploaded a .htaccess that pointed to another site which has a .htaccess pointing back to this one! (reasons irrelevant here)

Of course this prize page was greybarred by now. It took less than 10 days for it to regain the original PR and ranking, so your luck could be similar. Good luck.