Matt Cutts: Short Website Downtime Won’t Hurt Your Search Rankings

Back when Googlebot used to crawl your website as soon as a month and rank your website accordingly throughout the month-to-month Google Dance, the sheer terror site owners used to have that their web site is perhaps down when Googlebot got here to crawl was fairly widespread.

Fortunately, instances the modified and Googlebot is recurrently accessing web sites on a really common foundation. However, one of many notifications in Google’s Webmaster Tools is a discover if an internet site is down when Google crawls.

A brand new Google Webmaster assist video brings up the topic of what precisely occurs when Googlebot can’t entry the positioning and the way which may have an effect on Google search rankings.

According to Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts in case your web site is down only for a day, corresponding to your host being down or a server switch, there shouldn’t be any detrimental affect to your search rankings. However, if the downtime is prolonged, corresponding to for 2 weeks, it might have affect in your search rankings as a result of Google doesn’t essentially wish to ship the consumer to an internet site that they know has been down, as a result of it gives the consumer with a poor consumer expertise.

Google does make allowances for web sites which might be sporadically having downtime, so Googlebot will go to once more 24 hours later so and see if the positioning is accessible.

Cutts did point out that in the event you suppose the issue isn’t together with your web site, go and go to the Google Webmaster assist boards and see if there’s any related posts from folks having the identical difficulty. He introduced up a current occasion the place Googlebot truly was having an issue on its finish fetching pages when it got here to accessing web sites, and effectively many customers received the discover that their web site was down, a fast take a look at the boards confirmed that a number of folks have been having the very same difficulty and so the issue was on Googlebot’s finish.

Google does embody this on Webmaster Tools notices to easily give site owners a heads-up that there could possibly be an issue with their web sites, so it provides site owners and alert to research what the issue could possibly be. But whether it is only for a brief time frame and the problem resolves itself rapidly, corresponding to with a internet hosting firms quick downtime, there isn’t any want for concern about it affecting your Google search rankings.