Downtime is such a hard word for Bloggers and Webmasters. We fear it next to those Panda and Penguin updates. But do you know a site’s downtime could affect its ranking? We are going to discuss this issue from Google’s view, like how they consider a site’s downtime for its ranking. Because you might have downtime for 10 minutes, 30 minutes or even for a week sometimes.
Your Website’s Downtime and Ranking
So when Google crawls a webpage and its current status is unavailable (downtime), it will have two scenarios then. Like whether your site will eventually appear soon or if your site is gone forever.
#1 – If your site is down for some minutes or maximum a day or two.
If this is the case then Google might not harm your site in any way because they can understand it as a normal downtime caused on most of the blogs. So Google crawls again, and if your site is up then the rankings will be normal, nothing touched.
#2 – If your site is down for several days, a week or a month.
But due to some laziness or some inactivity, your site might be down for some weeks or even months. At this point Google has no other option then to drop it from the search results at least until they can fetch again, find it, index it and then return it, just like good old days.
USEFUL: Be The First To Know When Your Site/Blog Is Down
Below you can see how Matt Cutts handles this question, just like the we explained above.
A site gets de-indexed after 16 days of downtime.
I think if a site is down for almost 30 days, it might get de-indexed.
But if the same site gets back with same data, it have a good chance to re-appear, but it need to have a good uptime in future.