How Website Downtime Affects Your Seo
In Todays post, I wanted to bring up the issue of how website downtime affects your websites Google SEO ranking. Site downtime is a very BIG DEAL. Besides the loss of money, sales, leads, memberships, loss of customer loyalty, or a general decrease in whatever conversion goal youre trying to achieve, you also need to worry about the loss of traffic due to the drop of your Google rankings.
Matt Cutts, speaker for Google Public Relations confirmed that being down for more than 15 minutes will affect your website ranking in some way. Google ranks a website based on what it finds while it crawls the website, so if it doesnt find anything, it cant rank or reindex it.
Here, is the official video from Matt Cutts
To sum up the answer from Matt Cutts, what Google does depends on how long your website is down. He explains it by asking viewers to look at it from Googles point of view. You dont want to keep dead sites in the search results, but you also dont want to throw out perfectly good websites after a few seconds of downtime. There is no real way for the web crawler to know when a website will be back up, it has to try to reach a compromise.
This means that if the crawler cannot find your website, it will try to re-crawl your website again throughout the day to see if it is back up. While this is happening, your website in most cases will temporarily drop in the Google search result rankings. It doesnt mean that Googles completely dropped it from its index, but it will if you are down for more than a few days.
Matt Cutts makes it seem like one day of downtime is no big deal, but from our experience, the website search result rankings will drop after six hours of down time on average 30% and stay that way until the next Google Refresh which can take 30-60 days.
If your website drops from Googles index, you will have to start your SEO efforts all over again. The lesson of this video for webmasters is that website uptime is important and that several days of downtime can cause permanent loss of position in Googles index.
If you cant afford any downtime with your website, and you want to deal with a Shopping Cart that takes a proactive roll in making sure that your website always stays online, then consider joining Shopping Cart Elite. We believe that as a paying customer, the least we can do is let you enjoy a good night sleep after a hard day of work, without worrying that your business will be offline when you wake up.