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On July 8 our site was down for a couple of hours. On that date, it appears that google started updating the content for all our competitors sites. We got missed.
On July 9. We had our site up, but everything but the front page was disabled and the frontpage had a banner and message down as we were doing a new database load to our website. Besides, who is up at 5:00 am, well Googlebot was.
I don't think that down for system maintenace is going to rank us high, if that content is used.
Am I screwed, or will google update the content again on our site, in a few days. I have seen it happen for several days in a row before.
Anybody had any experience with this.
BIG mistake. This may blow you totally out of Google for a month. Googlebot may now think that banner is your whole site. You'd have been better to keep the site offline to the world while dorking around.
Needless to say, I havn't been keen to test this out, but would be interested if anyone can confirm this as true or false.
This web site is temporarily off line for technical modifications. Thank you for your patience.
It may be a different story if they happen to catch it off line for too long, but so far this has maintained its position without losing an inch.
It could happen, worst thing is doing Adwords for a month. I once had a site out because of a down server, it was back the following month.
It's not a total disaster, just keep the inbounds and everything else intact.
My understanding, it is the deep crawl that impacts the sites rating, and that has not happen this month yet.
I already advertise on adwords, so worst come to worst, i will advertise on overture for a month to duplicate googles traffic.
Fortunately we are a mature site (6 years old) and only rely on search engines for 25% of our traffic.
Also make sure, that all other pages that normally exist, either work ok, or also return a 503-maintenance message. Just make sure they don't return 404 (not found), 301 (redirect) etc.
