Unreliable access to one’s website when spiders come crawling could result in being dropped from a search engine’s index.

When someone (truthfully) says “99.9 percent of the time,” it’s often all right to round up to one hundred.  When examining Google’s downtime, though, there’s a lot to be learned by looking at numbers even farther beyond the decimal point.

Everyone’s Internet connection goes a little bit wonky from time to time, and after having trouble reaching Yahoo.com, I thought this morning was one of those times for me.  But I was wrong; it turns out that Yahoo was having issues.

How the mighty have fallen – for a combined total of 2 hours and 52 minutes.  That interval is the amount of “downtime” experienced so far this year by the top three search engines, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of, considering we’re over 2,000 hours into 2007.

It seems that sites with considerable downtime can be deindexed by Google. In fact, a member at Google Groups has reported that his site has vanished from a previously third position for many searches. The reason could be downtime.

Vanessa Fox has responded by saying:

If it’s true that the backbone of any small business is its employees, then I believe it’s fair to say that the muscle of many small businesses would have to be their computers.

The world’s greatest search engine experienced a bit of an outage recently, and tremors were felt throughout the blogosphere.

Media Post reports that an attempt to upgrade Yahoo! Search Marketing this weekend inadvertently caused some glitches in the system, making it especially difficult for some advertisers and search marketing firms to manage their sponsored search campaign.