Server down and number cached pages fell by nearly half

[eric_harari]

My website was last crawled it seems september 11 Th. I got this info from google webmastertool. It seems that google bot came and tried to crawl the site october 1, we analyzed our raw data and found out that the server that host our server was down, for several hours which made impossible the crawling of our page. This is a heavy website we had more than 4000 pages indexed, and good ranking, the number of indexed pages went down to 2520, we have "monitored" the site and it seems that google started to re index pages at a verly low speed, 10 pages a day or so. Is there anything that you can suggest to solve this terrible situation. We also lost most of our ranking.

[edited by: tedster at 1:41 pm (utc) on Oct. 9, 2007]
[edit reason] no personal urls, thanks [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello Eric, and welcome to the forums.

It is not normal to loose nearly half of your pages from a server outage of just a few hours - not normal at all. There may well be something else going on - so definitely check your server logs regularly right now and be sure that googlebot is actually getting a 200 http response for all your "good" urls. Also check that any robots.txt file has only the rules you intend in there (use the webmaster tools robots.txt checker) and spot check some source code for pages to be sure no one hacked your site and did some hidden damage to you.

The normal scenario for a server outage of a few hours would be either no problem at all, or possibly 1 to 2 days of a dip.

[followgreg]

This actually sounds like something we have on a site.
Missing pages from Google index, no cache no nothing.

Yet the pages are linked from many other pages on the site and even have some very good incoming links (even .edu).

I can't find the reason for this. Checked the logs, checked the server, checked the pages found nothing.

From what I can tell that's a complete kill for a site. There must be something.

You may want to check for proxy hijacking too. First time I saw this that was the a probable cause. Now it's been months and GWT still doesn't show many of our pages. Even important pages disapear.

This one really worries me. It may be a Google problem too. Has anyone noticed something similar?

[BillyS]

>>It is not normal to loose nearly half of your pages from a server outage of just a few hours - not normal at all.

I agree. My host updated our mysql version and that took out our websites. It was nearly a day before they figured out exactly what happend (actually this was an unfortunate series of problems related to the upgrade - blew away a table, then prevented a restore from backup). I was worried about the affect but it had absolutely none that I can see.