Site downtime due to updates

[rrussell]

One of my clients periodically makes their entire domain inaccessible during their update processes and I'm worrying about a possible effect on the organic listings.

Updates occur probably about once per month and usually make the site unavailable for 3-4 hours. They always put updates into production on a Sunday.

They have a complicated staging to production process and I am under the impression this cannot be avoided -- a sitewide message saying the site is temporarily unavailable due to planned maintenance is posted.

My question is -- is this serious enough to warrant addressing? Are there any suggestions to keep this from effecting the organic rankings?

Thanks

[MichaelBluejay]

If their downtime is indeed necessary and "cannot be avoided" then does the answer really matter? If anyone told you that yes, this was a problem, what exactly would you do?

Personally, I doubt that 3-4 hours of downtime once a month would impact rankings at all, but I'm just guessing.

[jtara]

The ideal solution is to run a "read-only" version of the site during the update. That's not always possible, but give the idea some thought.

[rrussell]

MichaelBluejay, that is the response that I got from their IT department... I wanted to ask that question here to see if someone had an idea so I could give them an option other than taking the whole site down during updates.

Thanks jtara, I'll see if I can get them to keep a 'read only' version up.