New SEO Trick - Bring Your Site Down for Better Results!

My company site has been down for a week (unplanned). I checked the stats for SERP the day before the site went down. While the site was down, Google pretented it never existed! The site came back up yesterday. So I checked our placement to see how bad the damage was. Here's the results:

Google - 1 primary kw dropped 4 spots. 2 PKW raised by 1 spot. 3 PKW that weren't showing up before are now. And 1 PKW held steady.
1 secondary KW dropped 10 spots (a whole page!). 1 secondary KW held steady. And 1 secondary KW that wasn't showing up at all before is now.

Yahoo! - Y! was by far the most punishing. 7 PKW dropped rank, most by 40+ (these were top 5 before). 1 PKW raised up to #3. 2 PKW that didn't show before do now. And 2 held steady.
2 Secondary KW dropped off completely. And another dropped 50 spots so it may as well have.

MSN - 9 primary KW jumped up, most to the top 3 and 5 of those claim dual positions of "1 and 2" or "2 and 3". 1 PKW dropped 5 spots. 2 held steady.
2 secondary KW are now showing up that didn't before.

All 3 SEs have spidered the site in the last 24 hours. Odd how they'll ignore you for weeks but the moment the site is down they all know it. Thankfully they were just as fast to respond when it went back up.

For the most part, the ranks are encouraging (except Y! - grudge holding creep!). We now have only 3 primary KW that are not top 10 in at least one of the "big 3 SEs". And 11 new KW are now in the running.

First, you don't have to agree or like it or like me, but get that I have no reason to lie. I honestly thought I'd be starting my SEO efforts over after this mess, but that isn't what happened.

Second, the title was tongue-in-cheek. The post outlines my experience as it happened. I was suprised by the results and thought you all would like to see them.

Maybe because the domain is old we were granted some reprieve. I don't know. The only thing I can think of is that when the site came back up, the SEs had to reindex the site. When they did that some of the changes I've made to it over the last couple weeks finaly showed up.

And I did mention that Y! didn't like it and dropped us considerably. But for now we improved sligtly in G and a great deal in M.

I check the stats each week. When the site was down, G acted like it never existed but once it came back up G knew it was there.

When people post statements like yours i normally jump in with the `load of rubbish`.
BUT
when a site enters google it gets traffic.
It then loses traffic suddenly.
You them wait a year or so for the traffic to come back.
So if you wait for the traffic to drop and pull the site until the cache goes and when its gone put the site back up.
Google may think it is a new site and give you the `new site boost`.

Interesting to try this.

I agree... I may try this, too. The question I have is can doing this get you banned from G or the others?

I wouldnt say banned but i would try it on a site you didnt care about.
Registerfly do domians for $1.99 a year so its worth the risk

48 hours after the site went back up our "inflated" rankings on G are dropping back down. Most by about 5 positions.

Why would anyone ever want to close down their site for a few days and restart? You may or may not get better rankings when you come back, but what about all the users looking for you and getting the error page? I don't usually visit a site that cannot be found more than twice. After that, I assume it's gone or moved.

I agree with others that this does sound strange, but then again, don't argue with "real data" ... so in the interests of mentioning a possible reason, what about a "fresh content" boost somehow possibly going on (?)

That's the only thing I could figure. The SEs noticed the site was back up and then scanned the site to see if it was the same. Since content had changed, it altered our position on the SERPs. It's like it forced the SEs to spider the site.

Ooh man.. thats true risky..
My one site got down (unplanned) for 5 days.. And almost from all competetive keyword in top it went down to nothing in many. I remember only about G. Yahoo was steady all the time. Don't remember MSN at all.
And to get back that site to normal it took 1 and 1/2 month.

Hey, It's a great idea. Please, let us know how it goes. I wouldn't recommend it for a real site, but for a scrap site- maybe.

So....
Site is indexed and in SERPS, through whatever means serve up a 404 response to all visiting spiders for a week so they think site is down, leave site accessable for normal visitors, after a week let the spiders back in.

hmmmm interesting......

I think I'd only really recommend doing this to a site you didn't mind losing for a few months.

We recently changed hosts (3 months ago) and our google rankings are only just starting to get back to anywhere near what they were.

The site has been back up about a week now and our place in the SERPs is still "adjusting". Keep in mind this was unplanned down time. But here is where we are now:

Google
THE Primary KW - Dropped 6
Add'l Primary KWs - 4 added that didn't show before (3 in top 10), 2 up 5 places, 1 up 3 spots to #1, 1 held steady (#1).
Secondary KWs - 2 dropped 10 places. Rest are about where they were before.

Yahoo!
THE Primary KW - Dropped from #4 to 31 :-(
Add'l Primary KWs - 3 are now showing that didn't before (2 in top 20), 2 gained to top 10 spots, 2 held steady (both #1). 5 dropped position (2 by 10, 1 by 90!).
Secondary KW - No change

MSN
THE Primary KW - Gaiuned from 21 to 6
Add'l Primary KWs - 10 in top 10 (5 of those from not showwing up at all before), 1 held steady (#1), 3 dropped by about 6 position.
Secondary KW - 1 appears at #15 that didn't show up at all before, rest have no change.

Overall it looks like the site being down for a week didn't hurt things much and may have even helped it with a "forced" indexing by the SEs. It would be interesting to try this on purpose and see what the results are.

How does changing hosts effect you? We also changed hosts in the midle of this (that's why the site went down). But G should be cool with you changing hosts unless instead of a transfer you put something completely new up or got picked up by a host out of your region (I've heard this can hurt, though our new guys are based out of Canada and it doesn't seem to hurt us) or you went to a "spam host" - company that is notorious for hosting scum sites.