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Site Down Time Causing Drops in the Google Index
October 12, 2007
It's been a very busy week in Campaign Director land and now I'm ready to enjoy the weekend with my family. I've had to deal with many issues over the past few days but one particular problem I dealt with was a client's site down time and the affect this can have in the Google index.
Recently this client had been going through server changes and routine maintenance. Occasionally the site would be down from between a few minutes to a few hours at a time. Over the course of a few weeks they would lose and then regain positions (and indexed pages) in Google. The process of crawl, server down error, starting to be removed from the Google index, reappearance in the Google index, was only a few days.
This topic was discussed earlier this year (Site Down Time Can Remove You From Google Index) - (Site Downtime Can Delist You From Google) and it was understood then that:
1. Google can remove your pages from the index if they are down even temporarily.
2. "Googlebot will try a few times before the pages drop from the index." ~ Vanessa Fox
3. "As for how long it takes for a page to get back in once the site is back up, that really depends on a number of factors, such as how often the site is crawled in general." ~ Vanessa Fox
4. "Sometimes temporarily down pages turn into truly-gone-forever pages, so we have to drop those pages at some point. But it’s also true that we go back and revisit those pages pretty often and try to recrawl them in case the site comes back up." ~ Matt Cutts
I know this isn't anything new but it's an issue that I currently deal with and will probably continue dealing with in the future. Site down time has been a factor when trying to diagnose index problems with client sites and will stay in my checklist. It took my client a few days to reappear in the Google index and in those few days they lost major positions and traffic. For some Ecommerce sites, this "little" problem can turn into a major situation in a hurry.
Monitor your uptime, try to keep the downtime to a minimum, make sure your server returns the proper "server status" error.
See ya Monday, enjoy!
see all posts by James Gunn
posted by James Gunn at October 12, 2007 03:24 PM
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