You should be aware that if your site goes down, it can kill your search engine rankings. Usually this is due to some technical fault - either self-inflicted or caused by your hosting provider. But we recently had a client who closed their site over a long weekend for “routine maintenance” and to find that their rankings had taken a nose dive – albeit temporarily.
Routine Maintenance.. So What’s the Big Deal?
OK, here’s the deal – a search engine spider visits your site and indexes the content. If it gets errors when a site is down/unavailable it will try to come back a few times before temporarily removing your site from the index (different from a ban/penalty). This makes sense as the search engines only want pages in its SERPS that actually exist.
But let’s say that you need to perform some routine maintenance that may take a bit longer than you expected. The search engine spider visits the site but instead of digesting all of your juicy content, it finds a “Our site is currently unavailable due to maintenance” message. Now – guess what gets indexed? And it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to realise that this is the content stored in the DB instead of the “real” content on your site.
In fact, this issue seems to happen a lot. Take a look at this search in google for “currently unavailable” maintenance. More than 8 million pages! And when you click on some of the results – the pages are back to normal but as you can see, it is the “unavailable” message that is being stored in Google.
How long does it take to resolve?
Well, naturally this depends on the length of time that your site is down – but more importantly, it depends on the frequency cycle that Google indexes your website. If you are getting regular visits, then this situation should only exist for a few days.. but for many others, it could be weeks.
Be careful
The bottom line is that you and your web developers need to be aware of this condition and be sure to discuss your options with your SEO company. You could plan around this event by temporarily redirecting your web site to a hot/warm back up site or with a bit of forethought, you can work with your developers to ensure that actual down time is kept to a bare minimum.
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