A few of my sites were down (well actually just 'broken') for around 24 - 48 hours recently, is this enough to screw up my search engine rankings? Anyone know how long Google etc takes to throw a page out of the index if it's not there anymore?
My website was once down for a week, it didn't drop any place. But of course, it depends on how much Google crawls your site. If google drops by every day, you might have a bigger problem.
No you should be fine, search spiders crawl servers so the pages are still there, they just are not published is what the search spiders see...... If the servers offline for a while or you moved the pages off the server, (and not onto another) that is when the search engines would start dumping.
my site was down and it is crawled! i hope it will be all right in the next crawl, actually am also a bit worried, because sometimes it dose have a pretty bad effect on the serps and PR! the last thing i could hope is a de-indexing
I guess it depends on the site and the popularity. Why should Google show a site in the SERPS that doesn't respond? On the other hand, it will keep coming back and you should regain lost ground quickly once all problems are fixed. I think 24-48h could be somewhat critical for some sites. I usually just go into my webmaster tools and try to see how many urls it shows that didn't respond. If it is a relative small percentage of the site I am not as much worried.
I'm experiencing this SERP loss too,, but will got back to much higher position when it comes back... If you don't do dirty tricks,, why worry?