Google’s Matt Cutts will often provides answers to his own questions in these videos. This time the question comes from Googler Pierre Far, a Webmaster Trends analyst at Google UK. The question is:

My website was down for a couple of days and now has lost all of its Google rankings. What can I do to get them back?

Basically, Cutts’ answer is just to put the site back up, make sure it’s reliable, and make sure the pages that were there before are still there.

“There’s a tension at Google where if a page goes away (maybe there’s a 404), we don’t know if it’s really gone away or whether that page will be back,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a server time out, you know, the server is kind of slow. And so, on one hand, you don’t want to keep showing a page that would be a bad user experience, like it’s really gone away. On the other hand, it’s very common for websites to go down for an hour, two hours, a day, two days…and so you also want to give the benefit of the doubt, so you can revisit those pages and see whether they’ve gone up.”

“So we do have different varying time periods where we basically allow, if a domain looks like it’s gone away, but it comes back – you know, it’s back online, then we just sort of say, ‘Okay, it was a transient error,’ so the short and simple advice is just make sure you put the website back up the way it was, and hopefully things should recover relatively quickly,” says Cutts.

This may not be quite the answer you were looking for, but that’s the one Google is giving. It would certainly be interesting to know more about these “varying periods of time”.

Facebook tells us that the downtime experienced across Europe was caused by a DNS change that was part of a “traffic optimization test.” It was obvious already, but Facebook once again confirmed that this was not a hack. Here’s the full statement:

“Earlier today we made a change to DNS as part of a traffic optimization test, and that change resulted in some users being temporarily mis-routed. We detected and resolved the issue immediately, but a small number of users located primarily in Western Europe experienced issues accessing the site while the DNS addresses repopulated. We are now back to 100 percent, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

These things happen, but it’s usually not noticed by most of the world. Of course, any small change in Facebook will be detected thanks to the social networks recent climb to one billion active users worldwide. Combine that with so-called Anonymous members seeking attention on Twitter, and you have a populace that begins spreading rumors and falsehoods.

If Facebook or any other major service like GoDaddy is down, don’t believe the words of somebody claiming to be from Anonymous. There’s only a few trustworthy Anonymous feeds on Twitter, and Anonymous Own3r is not one of them. He has proven twice now that he’s just seeking attention. It’s in our, and your, best interest to ignore any further claims coming from any Anonymous feed that’s not been verified.

In fact, some people have been tweeting about Facebook downtime today, less than 24 hours since the filing was made public (hat tip: NY Daily news).

It’s a good thing there’s a Twitter. It never goes down.

People were generally happy about Flipboard coming to the iPhone, especially for the new Cover Story addition. The new feature highlights social media posts that are most likely to interest the user. Cover Stories work much like the News Feed in Facebook, but it combines posts from Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Reader, and numerous others. This allows users to catch up with their social profiles quicker and from one location. At the moment Cover Story is only available for the iPhone version of Flipboard, but Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, said the feature is coming to the iPad in the coming months.

We’ll keep an eye on the situation and keep you posted as further details emerge.

Below are some of the funnier “Reddit is down” memes:

With the ample free time Redditors now have, many have turned to Twitter… to talk about Reddit.

What could be the most loathed mascot on the Internet, Twitter’s Fail Whale has been popping up and ruining the start of the morning for many across the Internet. It’s unclear at this time what the issue with Twitter is as they’ve yet to update their Status blog.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Fail Whale, here is a little background on the big lug: The Fail Whale is employed by Twitter during periods of excessive downtime and is accompanied by the message “Twitter is over capacity. Please wait a moment and try again.”

Below are some tweets (when I could get them to load) of people venting their frustrations after seeing the Fail Whale.

Have you seen the Fail Whale this morning? Let us know in the comment area

Here’s the golden standard (or the norm, depending on how you look at it): Facebook and MySpace both achieved an uptime of 100 percent over the past 14 months, according to CheckMySite.  Twitter, meanwhile, averaged closer to 99.69 percent.

What’s more, Twitter’s figure for November 2009 – 99.91 percent – is worse than the figures recorded in July 2009, January 2009, and December 2008.  Plus, October 2009 was especially ugly, with CheckMySite pegging Twitter’s uptime at just 99.18 percent.

Some folks might shrug Twitter’s outages off as a quirk; the failwhale has its own fan club, after all.  Downtime can be off-putting to other individuals, though, and could pose a very serious problem as far as Twitter’s appeal to businesses goes.

There’s not much else to say on this subject, considering how long downtime issues have plagued Twitter.  The company just needs to sort this out sooner rather than later.

Hat tip goes to Don Reisinger.

Related Articles:

> You May Get More Traffic From Twitter Than You Realize

> Paid Twitter Accounts To Debut This Year, Stone Says

> What’s Not To Like About Twitter’s New Retweet Feature?

We’ll start with the reliability issue.  Pingdom reports that Twitter’s downtime has been diminishing over the past few months, reaching about 11.5 hours in June and a little over four in July.  The really promising thing: Twitter’s homepage was only inaccessible for one hour and three minutes during August.

Assuming this trend isn’t a fluke, the company will have answered its users’ main complaint.  Admittedly, the big challenge of monetization still looms, but this next bit of data should in some way help address that.

Hitwise’s Sandra Hanchard writes, "Visits to Twitter by Australian Internet users increased by 518.2% year-on-year, comparing weeks ending 1 September 2007 and 30 August 2008."  A nice chart proves the point.

Popularity at home, international success, a solid tech setup – the pieces to something seem to be falling into place.  Assuming spam or some other thing doesn’t get in the way, Twitter looks to have some staying power.

As fans of Twitter know, the site can be subject to maddening downtime. When big news happens and lots of people start tweeting, Twitter experiences spikes.

Those tend to be followed by outages, ones that likely led to a shakeup at the service over the past month. Two of Twitter’s top tech types left the company, a development that’s difficult to cast as coincidence in the wake of outages in the early part of 2008.

The Royal Pingdom blog said social sites monitored by the Pingdom service experienced varying amounts of downtime from January through April of 2008. MySpace fared the best, giving up a mere 65 minutes to downtime issues.

Twitter enjoyed a comparatively lengthy break. Its downtime over the four-month period hit 37 hours and 16 minutes. It’s nearly a week off from the day job.

Reunion.com’s nearly 19 hours offline looks like a blip in comparison. That was good enough for second place in the outage department, followed by relative newcomer Pownce, and AOL’s social media acquisition, Bebo.

The whole issue of services in the cloud may be all the rage these days. But the smart kids building these services have little knowledge of the time when client/server apps were a business fixture, yielding to the desktop model over time.

Not being able to tweet for a few hours may be inconvenient, but some tech firms want to convince companies that cloud computing of networked services is the way to go for some of their business needs.

It’s a nice idea, but not one that has been borne out by the performance of the Internet in the US anyway. Outages happen, if not at the hosting facility then at a point in between. Downtime will always be a grey cloud drifting on the computing horizon, with customers hoping it doesn’t rain on them.

 Google AdWords In Working Order

Planned maintenance will keep people from signing in or tinkering with anything between 10 AM to 2 PM PDT on April 12th.  But on the Inside AdWords blog, "Blake" promised everyone, "Your campaigns will continue to run as usual."

Blake even gave a heads up about when future downtime should occur.  "AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times – although in May it is planned to occur one week later than usual, on May 17th, due to Mother’s Day," he wrote.  (And let that serve as a double reminder, lest you forget Mother’s Day.)

That’s about it, then.  Have a nice Saturday, and a good Friday and Sunday, too, while you’re at it.