The bottom falls out of my rankings after server outage

[webwench]

My webhost went down for more than 2 days at the end of last month. As a result, my websites have now lost their google ranking which they have held for quite a long time.

Will I be able to quickly recover my rank when googlebot gcomes around again or will this be a "from scratch" process?

Needless to say, I am changing hosting companies. What a lousy way to do business.

[tedster]

Google is very quick to remove sites that are not currently online. They naturally don't want to show a link that doesn't take people to an active page. Recovery is usually very fast after the site is back up.

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

I have a little site that was with a dodgy host. It was down from time to time and kept giving FastCGI: incomplete headers errors to Googlebot. I've moved hosts a few days ago and made a reconsideration request but no luck so far.

It was a worthwhile little site and I may re-write it and put it on another domain name and server if the great Google will not let me back on the gravy train.

Cheers

Sid

[webwench]

Thank you for your responses. I am in the process of changing hosts as intermittent down times seem to be a recurring problem. Two and a half days just seemed a bit over the edge for me. I'm trusting in the Google Gods not to penalize me too long for something over which I had no control.

[Reno]

I doubt if you would have had a problem if your server had gone down for 2.5 hours (which is still really long), but a server out for more than 2 days looks like a goner to anybody. Personally, I find being down for 2 and a half minutes to be troubling. So whether or not they had a good reason (DOS attack for example), you are definitely doing the right thing to find a more dependable service.

...........................

[jonathanleger]

I had a site whose server went down for a few days and resulted in the same thing -- rankings dropped badly.

Recovery is usually very fast after the site is back up.

This was not the case for this particular site. Although it was only down for 48 hours, six weeks later it was still way down in the rankings.

I setup a blog to test a new piece of software I'm using, and made a few post-dated posts to the blog (one new post every 2 days or so). Within 2 weeks the blog was back in the top 10 for all 3 sets of keywords I was targeting.

So if you're not getting your rankings back, try adding a blog with some regularly updating fresh content.

[webwench]

I am so sorry to hear that you fell and stayed down. I am MORE THAN HAPPY to report that my rankings have been restored! There is a Google God! I knew that all along....:-) I'm still changing hosts but at least this was not catastrophic. What I did do, as soon as my site was restored, was submit a new site map. I don't know if that made a difference but either way -- it worked for me!

[Asia_Expat]

I've suffered two separate periods of substantial downtime over the last few months. My previous hots in Europe was a lame street dog and I was down consistently for 30 minute periods, the final straw being two 9 hours downtimes in a week.
I moved to a host in Singapore and after two months, the server disappeared last week. The killer was the lackadaisical support from my host. Their office is a five minute walk from the datacentre in Singapore but it still took them 21 hours to physically address the server to get it fired up... I was hopping mad.

Upshoot is I have yet to see any noticeable effect in my traffic... touch wood.

[webwench]

Touch wood = Knock on wood? LOL! You're very fortunate that your traffic was not affected. I could tell a drastic difference when our site fell. We were (until just recently) a pure 100% internet based website and without that website...well, we don't even want to think about that. I'm in the middle of opening a showroom but that store won't do near what my website brings in the way of business. The brick and mortar step was to capture local business (contrary to the rest of the country we're in a massive boom down here) and get to the office out of my guest bedrooms, kitchen and living room. I couldn't find my furniture! LOL!