If my website goes down for a day, does that affect my SEO rankings?

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If my website goes down for a day, does that affect my SEO rankings?

YouTube video

There are so many reasons why website owners should make sure that their websites are always accessible. This is because if the website goes down, there is a big possibility that visitors will steer away and start visiting their competitor’s website. By then, the online marketing strategy will suffer a setback.

When a website is not accessible, this also means that Google bots is unable to crawl that website which may affect the SEO rankings. What if your website cannot be accessed for an entire day? Should this matter cause you to be concerned about your website? Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam Search team took the time to explain this and answer a question sent by a concerned website owner.

Video Question

I got a “Google bots can’t access your site” message in Webmaster Tools from my host being down for a day. Does it affect my rankings when this happens?

Video Highlights

Matt Cutts stressed out the following points:

  • If your website is down for a span of 24 hours or less then you should not worry too much.
  • If it is down for 2 weeks then there is a good chance that your website has a problem and that it is really down. This would be the best time to start looking for effective webhosting solutions.
  • Google tries to compensate for sporadic downtimes in websites and make a few allowances (believe to be 24 hours).
  • If a website is down, Google and its web spam search team checks these sites in 24 hour intervals.
  • At times, it may be Google bots that is down. Google bots can also have a few downtimes in terms of fetching results and responses from websites.

In order to improve your website uptime, you should:

  • Make sure that your web hosting solutions have minimal downtimes. This is to make sure your website’s visitors and Google bots is able to access your website.
  • Upgrade your web hosting plan to cloud hosting to ensure 100% uptime. Some cloud hosting plan provide a guaranteed 100% uptime as your website is hosted in multiple cloud server rather than a single web host.
  • Sign up for Google Webmaster tools. If Google bots is unable to access your website, you will be notify via email.
  • Log into Google webmaster forum to see if there are many people talking about Google bots crawl error at the same time. This may be due to Google bots downtimes instead of your web host.