About 2-3 of weeks or so ago our server was down for about two days... We were ranked #1 and top 10 on a bunch of relevant keywords. Our PR went up in the past month or so from a 4 to a 5 on a couple of pages on our site. This Monday I noticed we dropped of the radar on most rankings but 2 or 3 main ones where we dropped from #1 to #4 and #10... Could the server being down have caused all these?
In one word, yes. I found several of my sites down three nights in succession. I would complain and in a few minutes they would be back up but keyword tracker showed fall in MSN rankings on those sites.
it happen to me once and yes i got several pages out from google, i think its also depends on how often google are crawling your site
Thank you Smyrl for your reply... So in other words if my sites were down for two full days than I could have dropped to 1000+ on most rankings (about 170 key phrases and variations) and left with only a handfull... and still probably dropping off those rankings in spite of a higher PR Anybody else experienced anything similar?
BTW: So far I only noticed a change in Google rankings... not on Yahoo or MSN where we are still at the top.
I'm trying to figure out what happened... It is not easy finding out reasons for dropping off most rankings... First thing came to mind was the server being down.
Did your rankings recover relatively quick after the server crash? Was it just Google or Yahoo/MSN also?
I dropped from number 1 on MSN for one of my phrases on Sept 11th and still am not ranked there. Maddening. It could be coincidence but doubt it. Only keywords I dropped for were for the ones associated with that server.
Yes, definitely it will be a factor. If Google (or any other search robots) would not find the site they previously indexed, they might remove the URLs in the index database. If subsequent attempts yield success, it is reinstated, but could take time to get back to normal.
I've had some sites down for a few days. They mostly depended on Google for traffic. This was months ago. They never recovered!!!!
you can change how often google crawls your pages, its where you submit your Sitemap to google, under webmaster tools (crawl rate). google made this so it can let webmasters decide how often they want google to crawl their pages, but its not in time like days. its by how fast you want google to crawl your pages so google wont put lot of load on your servers. the faster you make it, more often google will crawl your website, the slower you make it, less often google will crawl your pages. For newer website I recommend making it fast so your website can get updated more often and get higher ranking since you will be adding more content. For older websites, medium rate or slower rate is recommended b/c sometimes if you get high loads of traffic your servers can shut down for some reason, so its good to make google crawl your pages less often. hope this helps and most of you might have known about this.