13 replies to this topic

[dee]

My hosting company's server went down for ten hours last Tuesday 3rd August, 48 hours later around 80% of my site's pages have dropped dramatically in Google, i had excellent positions for many key phrases, i noticed that Googlebot visited us 54 times this am...the hosting company assures me that we should go back into position in a few days, that it should just be a temporary glitch...any thoughts on this?
thanks
Dee

[smc_online]

1. Switch providors.
2. Ask for a refund for the 10hrs of loss uptime.
3. Review your service agreement and area of uptime garantee.
4. If you've lost a considerable amout of revenue AND you have the
resourse to take legal action, try to recoup any loss revenue.

[dee]

well thanks - i take your points - but does anyone have any idea if the advice of just wait it will all come good again - is sound or should i be doing something to speed up our recovery?
then i can sort out the provider!

[Randy]

You should be okay in a few days Dee. It's just a matter of the bot running back through your site, verifying everything is still there, then dropping it back into their database. That process can take anywhere from a day or two up to a week or two. I've never seen it go farther than that for a situation like you describe.

[dee]

thanks that's very reassuring!

[dee]

I just saw on one of the forums that the Google Dance took place at exactly the time my site was down all day, my pages have all dropped from the first page (mostly top three listings to around 8th or 9th page), does this change my situation?

[Randy]

Whoever told you that was fibbing. Well, maybe that's too strong. They're just out of touch.

There is no such thing as a Google Dance anymore. Those monthly updates of the Google index ended last year. Now Google performs what has come to be known as Rolling Updates, meaning their database and index are changing constantly.

[dee]

Thanks for the reply Randy we're just on tenterhooks here until we see some movement, it's been a week since the downtime and five days since it devastated our visitor numbers overnight...and as the site is a portal for our roughly 200 web clients we're holding our breath...
We did contact our provider and asked about a dedicated server with a back-up but after reading some of stories on the Forum we're too scared to move anything now...in case it makes matters worse, in fairness this is the first incident of it's kind in two years...
hopefully it comes good v.soon

[dee]

it's been two weeks now since our downtime and many of our pages are at around page 11 or 12 where they used to be in the top three results of the first page, there has been some movement some have gone up to page 4 or 5, is this the kind of progress to expect. I'd half hoped that when google bot came around and saw everything was up and running and being updated regularly that we'd flip back somewhere around our usual position....or is it more of a gradual improvement over time
i can't help feeling we've been really penalised for being off line, although according to my hosting company, no one else has complained of the same problem.

[Jill]

I'm sure it's a coincidence. 10 hours of downtime is nothing and wouldn't affect your rankings.

[dee]

i see, so do you think that this entire fall in ranking is due to something else?
the earlier message i had -
"You should be okay in a few days Dee. It's just a matter of the bot running back through your site, verifying everything is still there, then dropping it back into their database. That process can take anywhere from a day or two up to a week or two. I've never seen it go farther than that for a situation like you describe. "
so i've just been waiting for things to improve and they have in most cases gone up again but no where near the level i had before...my visitors have dropped from around 550 per day from Google to around 50
if it's because of something else, what should i be doing now...please

[Randy]

I still wouldn't panic about it Dee.

I've seen sites pop all the way back in immediately and I've seen them slowly climb their way back up the SERPs.

Considering that Google is chock full of partially indexed pages right now, and assuming that not all of your site has been re-indexed in one fell swoop, a slow climb would make sense.

I wish there were a way to speed it up for you, but there isn't any I know of short of breaking into Googleplex and leading the spider around by his little hand erm... leg erm... tentacle ...erm whatever.

[Jill]

i see, so do you think that this entire fall in ranking is due to something else?

If they actually have your pages indexed, but they're simply not ranking well, then yes. It would have nothing to do with your server being down.

Servers down make pages gone -- not rank poorly.

If they're missing completely, then them being down could be the problem, but it shouldn't take long for them to be back in the database.

[dee]

Randy and Gill - thanks, i guess i'll have to wait and see, thanks for your time both of you