Server Maintenance and Googlebot

If a 404 error will Googlebot stop coming?

[rover]

Our dedicated host provider is going to do some major upgrades to our server and expects a downtime of about 15 - 20 minutes.

I just checked our server logs to see how many times Googlebot had visited over the past hour, and see that it was about 100 pages visited during this time (This was just a totally random check). Also about 25 visits from Yahoo Slurp.

So now, I'm really concerned about the 15 - 20 minutes of downtime. I guess I just have to hope that Googlebot doesn't visit during the downtime, but what if it does? If it visits our main page, and gets a 404 error, will it ever bother to come back? We are in the top ten for Google for our main search terms, so this worries me a lot right now.

Does anyone have any experience in this, and is there anything that I can do to avoid a problem with Google not being able to find pages for a short period?

[jomaxx]

If the server is merely offline, then Google won't get a 404 error. They'll get no response, which is normal and fine.

If for some reason you have to reload the whole site after the upgrade, then you might want to figure out how to turn the site off temporarily, either through whatever control panel is available to you or via a .htaccess file (I think that can be done but I'm not 100% sure).

[Stefan]

So now, I'm really concerned about the 15 - 20 minutes of downtime.

I wouldn't worry too much. It's not going to dump you because it can't find you once or twice. If the site were down for a week or two it might be more serious. Most of the SE's seem to be pretty good about accepting short periods of down-time, (if they weren't, there'd be a lot less sites indexed).

[GoogleGuy]

Yah, I think we should be able to work around that with no problem. We'll just try again later. Maintain away..

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

This kind of positive response/reassurance is very valuable so keep it up GG!

(This comes up often so why not get G to make a comment about this in the Webmaster Guidelines?)

[kivanc]

our nine sites were closed for one week three months ago. Five of them are still in same position but others went down to #50 from #4 #5 but they countinue to go up. Now one of them #22

[rover]

Thanks very much for the feedback, I appreciate it, and it was good news to hear that from the GG.

[GoogleGuy]

Point taken, BeeDeeDubbleU. We don't revise the webmaster guidelines as often as we could (it has to get translated into like 10 different languages), but when we do, I'll try to remember this. A "Don't Panic!" section is probably a good idea. There's a lot of things the site owners sometimes worry about that happens to lots of other site owners each month too--so we try to make things robust enough that your typical hosting incidents don't cause major problems.