Hey my server has been experiencing some major downtime lately. I was just wondering if google tries to crawl it when its down could this negatively affect my rankings?
Only if the downtime is signfiicant. Like a matter of days or weeks. If it's just an hour or two, then you should be fine.
If Google crawls your site when your server was down, surely it will effect your SERP. But, after it will come to normal position when your server works fine. But, takes little time (more than a week).
Its very frustrating, its my first site where im trying to make money so i decided to go with a free host (110mb) till I find out if i can make enough for it to be worth it to pay for hosting but seems like it goes down for a good 6 hours once a week.
It's pretty important to improve uptime when you are looking for a hosting. I do believe it can affect serps.
Yes it can. This turns off the robots for some time. But if major means a few hours then thats ok. But if its more than a few days and even causing your site to disappear in search engine then its time to change. Best would be to have a backup of your site at another host and if your current host has a major problem just change the DNS for awhile.
Yes it absolutely can affect your serps. I had a site smashed when the server went down for about 20 hours. It took about 2 1/2 weeks to return to its pre-crash rank. Downtime is expensive, you may pay the price for some time after the site is back up. I understand why, google doesn't want to send users to a page that doesn't work so they wack your rankings.
Google clearly states that both loading time and site reliability (up time) affect your position (trust) along with domain age, length of time the domain has been paid for, and in links.
As karpok says, it depends on what your site is displaying at the time Google crawls it. Obviously if there's nothing there, it won't be too relevant to its keyword terms.
my site was down for more than a week because of DDos and today my SERPs dramatically down too, my keyword from position 3 to position 8 (the second page), hope i can go back.
yes, I think there is! Meanwhile, your site will be its low rating google. your site also encountered the same situation on my page itvn-pro.blogspot.com
It depends on how frequent google bot visit your site. If you have constant update, and monitor your last visit of google bot to your site with google.com/webmaster tool, you can get a good view here. If google bot visit your site 2-3 days once and last visit was just before crash. I think it is possible it won't hurt your SERP ranking until next 2-3 days. If google bot visits your site everyday, then it will effect your serp ranking within first day itself.
If your traffic is more rather move to a better server, i had more downtime with the old server so i was compromising revenue, loss of traffic for saving $10-15 a month. I moved to a way better server, page loading time is improved 3-4 folds...
Definitely. I think any little blip isn't going to be that big of a deal, but I think a lot of the time it has to do with whether Google (or any other SE) knows that it's down. I think spidering might be one of those ways, but I think they're more concerned about results. If you're in the top 10 for a keyword that gets a lot of searches, google doesn't want dead sites coming up. You'll notice that when you click on a result at google its really an outbound link through google, which means they probably check the server there. If it is down for a period of time, I could see them bumping you for a high traffic keyword. You'll probably get it back later, but it would probably be a strike against you for it and too many strikes means you're downgraded.