Can (temporary) server downtime/slowness get you dropped out of the index?

Imagine you are doing very well with your site and the traffic is growing and growing and growing untill you reach your server capacity limits.

If you would not upgrade your server for a few weeks and the site goes down for 5-10 minutes several times per day during those weeks. Will Google penalize your website for it and drop you out of the index to protect their users? Or not?

A slow website and one that keeps showing errors, is a sign of bad quality in my opinion.

Google looks for quality websites. The above issues, don't suggest quality. I wouldn't be surprised if the website in question suffers losses as a result.

Google aside, it's not a very good experience for your users, to keep having downtime and slowdowns.

If I were you, and I was serious about my website, I'd upgrade my server or I'd quit being a webmaster.

Yes, of course however imagine you were just working on a new website that would be more efficient and you decided to wait a few weeks ;)

I've seen it happen before myself, I use to own a funny pictures website and ranked #2 for the phrase funny pictures, during a re-location of their dedicated servers to a new facility I saw a downtime of over 72 hours; this was due to mis-placement of my server (don't ask me). I saw my rankings drop into the 4th and 5th page for over 2 months before it regained it's normal status.

Hello everybody, have been lurking on this great forum for some time now, great info here!
I manage a site that has been in the TOP 10-20 positions on Google for over 3 years with out main keyword phrases until last month our hosting company had problems and our site was down for 5 full days.
Of course we were very annoyed with our site beeing down, but the hosting company finally fixed their problems and we decided to stay with them as this was the first major problem we experienced with them.
However, about 3 weeks after our site was down, we experienced now a major drop in our Google positions, most phrases we ranked place 11 - 20 before we are not showing up now even in the top 100 :-(.
We worked hard the last 3 years to keep our positions in the top 10-30 for most keyword phrases - does that mean that all our hard work is now lost? I'm very sure that the server downtime caused that major drop, as we didn't do any major changes on our site or with our SEO strageties.
Does anybody know, how long it will take, unit Google 'forgives' us, that our site was down and will put it back to the former positions? Is there a way to 'inform' Google that our site is back up?

That's all very frustrating, as this downtime was not our fault, but the hosting company's, and I fear that now getting back to our former positions will take a looooong time and of course that costs the site owner many clicks / visitors/ clients.

Any advise how to get us back up quickly?

Good hosting does not cost that much money and is very important to your visitors. It can also impact your search rankings. If google tries to crawl your site multiple times and gets no response or a time out then they might decide that your site is no longer there. The people who link to you might take down links if your site is not available when they check their links.

Google does not explain in detail how they assess this but why take chances. If your host if stinking up the visitor experience of your site fire them.

As for the site that was down for several days and then saw a ranking drop... it might have been caused by other things. If your links are still intact you will probably recover. However, many believe that google now uses visitor behavior in the rankings of websites. If you have a down time of significant length then the data that google is getting about your site is not pretty.

Bearing in mind Google shows the response time when indexing in Google Web Master Tools we know that it looks at response time.

It would be niave to assume that this wasn't a factor.

If your site is actually down repeatadly then when it indexeds a page that isn't coming up you will find that it drastically effects your perofrmance in the SERPs.

As EGOL says, good hosting isn't expensive and if you get to a point where you need it, you either have a very poor inefficient site or enough demand to warrant the costs.

Hey there!

My advice would be to make some major changes to your website a.s.a.p. and get a bigger/faster plan at your host (or more RAM/processor speed etc.) so that Google will notice you are making major changes to the website and improving your service quality so that they may considder/be required to revalidate your website.

Google does not hate people (or websites), they only try to serve their users (searchers) with the best content and sites that go down are not trustful. Imagine that 1 in 10 sites is a less stable one and goes down once per 2 months. What could Google do to prevent that their users will see a 404 error page when they click a link? They will penalize those websites so that they won't get on top anymore.

But they should also think about the webmaster in this case. What if he or she is making major changes to their website to serve the users even better? It could cause downtime so if Google notices this they may have to remove the penalty again or for example place a rule on top of it: "webmaster is working, so this downtime could be caused by that" which could in the end only get you even better results as it also means "website is actively worked on/updated".

hi,
thanks to all for your fast replies.

Agreed, good hosting is very important, but please keep in mind that before the problem last month we never had any downtimes before, we were always were happy with our hosting service, very fast, more than enough space, always been very reliable before, great customer support, etc...

We are hosting with them since several years and as it was the first time that we had a problem with them, and they appoligized and communicated a lot with us to get us back online as soon as possible, so we decided for now to stay with them, unless we will experience more problems in the future. After all, nobody is perfect and as we were always very happy with their service, we decided not to switch hosting for now.

Anyway, the damage has been done, no sense looking back now saying IF the host wouldn't have that blackout and our site would not have been down, our positions wouldn't have dropped so drastically.

I checked the backlinks, luckily we didn't loose any of those due to the downtime, but Google probably tried to 'access' our site several times while we were down and therefore dropped us from position 10-20 down to 200 or even worst.

So now, I need to find a way to tell Google like 'hey guys, sorry we were down, but we are back!'
Doing major changes to the site like suggested by Jan Jaap might do that? However, the site is how the site owner wants it, and it is optimized very well for our major keyword phrases. Any changes to that would probably make it worst in SEO terms.
It took us several years SEO work and patience to get where we were before the downtime as our market is very competive, I just fear that we have to wait now many months or even years (???) again to be back near the top again?

So frustrating...

My advice would be not to think about all that, Google will probably know eventually. The service quality if far more important, if you get Google to know that you will get the best rankings you have ever received and they are the most honest aswell then.

Maybe you could find a way to serve your users/visitors better then before. It could be anything, speed improvement (check out this page for tips from Google itself), better design, other page structure etc. Just to serve them (your visitors) better.

I just experience the same problem. Although I am not really ranked yet. My server was a VPS server and having major problems. Constantly locking up and taking forever to load.

I just finished a switch over to a Quad Core Xeon with 100mbps port and 2GB Ram..

The home page loads SOoooooooooooooooo much faster ..

139.00 will get you a Quad Core Xeon with 2GB Ram and 2TB Transfer in one of three datacenters.. WDC,Dallas, or Seattle..

for 199.99 you can get a Quad Core Xeon 10TB Transfer and 2GB Ram..

My provider showed MRTG before purchase .. plenty of bandwidth.. I dunno if I can give em a "shout" on here or not, but if you wanna know where I went for this deal PM me if the system has PMs...

Best investment I made so far.. I am sure it will payoff when I finally launch and the hits come rolling in

Jan Joop, thanks again for the reply and the info. You are right, I'm also a 'believer' to optimize website for the users rather than focos on search engines only. I will build something interesting into the site and hope that Google recognizes the changes I will do as a positive update.
Just hoping it will be good enough to bring us back where we have been.
Thanks again!

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