Can A Site’s Downtime Affect Its Ranking At Google?

Matt Cutts from Google is here to discuss whether a site’s downtime can affect its ranking. The short answer is yes. Though as usual, Matt is not prepared to give us any specifics.

If your site is down for a few hours, and Google’s bots try to crawl it during that time, it’s not going to create any problems. If you need to take everything offline for maintenance for several hours, your status at Google shouldn’t change. If it happens a few times, your content may not be as fresh in the Google database as it could be, but as long as you’re back online the next time the bots drop by, there will be no harm done.

The problems crop up if your site is down repeatedly when Googlebot arrives. If Google has too many unfulfilled visits to your site in a row, the chances of your site being temporarily removed from their database are pretty good. (Not to mention all the other problems unreliable servers can cause – lost traffic, lost sales, missing emails, and lost links.) How many is too many? No one outside of Google could answer that. But if your site is chronically unavailable, you probably have bigger problems than wondering what Google is thinking.