Matt Cutts Talks About Site Downtime’s Impact On Rankings

Google has released a new Webmaster Help video with Matt Cutts addressing the question: If my site goes down for a day, does that affect my rankings? Sound familiar? I thought so too. Earlier this yea...
Matt Cutts Talks About Site Downtime’s Impact On Rankings
Written by Chris Crum
  • Google has released a new Webmaster Help video with Matt Cutts addressing the question: If my site goes down for a day, does that affect my rankings?

    Sound familiar? I thought so too. Earlier this year, Cutts did a similar video addressing the question: How do I get my search rankings back after my site has been down?

    Here’s the new one:

    “Well, if it was just for a day, you should be in pretty good shape,” says Cutts. “You know, if your host is down for two weeks, then there’s a better indicator that the website is actually down, and we don’t want to send users to a website that’s actually down, but we do try to compensate for websites that are transiently or sporadically down, and you know, make a few allowances. We try to come back 24 hours later or something like that, so if it was only just a short period of down time, I wouldn’t really worry about that.”

    He adds that you might want to drop into the Google Webmaster forum and look around a little. He notes that there was recently a day where Googlebot itself was having trouble fetching pages. It usually has “pretty good reliability,” though, he says.

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