Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
How does Google handle situations like this?
My guess is that some kind of algo will kick in that will start to lower the crawl frequency until the content returns, at which point the algo will cause the crawl frequency to ramp back up to whatever it was before the temporary 404 situation.
It's certainly nothing to worry about anyway; Google want your content in their index as much as you do.
However, one has to take issue with the reasons for the outage, as it could adversely affect the website in other ways. Viewers won't return if they see the site down, you may lose a sale, your existing customers/viewers will lose faith, and so on.
If the problem is because of the service provider, you may be better to look elsewhere for a more reliable one. But a word of caution: changing a website to another server requires professional assistance, as it has to be done methodically and precisely.
Please define what you mean by down.
Only the index page is still listed, and the cache date has reverted to one from 9 months ago. They didn't keep any of the recent cache samples. At the time of the outage they did have a cache only a few days old, but they have dumped it in favour of a much older one.
If the site had come back online during the initial two weeks, I suspect there would have been very little long term damage. The site is still down (5 weeks now).
It was a server move gone bad (my fault for not registering new nameservers)
Had a redirect from the old server to the new server so you could see the home page, but all the internal pages gave 404's.
If I was in control of it, I might have done the redirects differently, but everything was already deleted off the old server, so I spent most my time escalating through the ranks of my domain registrar trying to get them to register the new name servers.
So don't worry about the 24-hour outage; you will probably have absolutely no problem.
