Website uptime is important for any marketer, but it might not be quite as critical as many people had thought. Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, recently released a video which confirms that a site going down for a short amount of time won’t cause long term rankings drops. If a site is unavailable for 24 hours or less it will likely retain the same rankings throughout the experience. Longer outages may result in a temporary de-listing, but within a short period of time after the site comes back up it should regain its former position in the SERPs.
Cutts said that when a site is down for more than a day or so they will have it removed because Google wants to direct users to a site where they will get a positive experience. Sites which are down will obviously not be providing any sort of benefit to the users, so Google would rather direct them to a site which may be inferior, but at least it is up and running.
Whether this has always been the Google policy or it is a change which took place at some point is unclear. People have long believed that site downtime of more than a few minutes would result in significant and long-lasting drops in site rankings, but that is not the case, at least not any longer.
Google will often go a step further for those who use their Webmaster Tools service by emailing the webmaster to let them know their site is down. Depending on how frequently a site is crawled by the Google spiders, they could get notified extremely quickly so they can take any necessary steps to have their service restored.
Of course, uptime is still essential for any site because while it is down the site could be losing significant amounts of traffic, which means potential customers. Sites of all types and sizes need to make sure they have a reliable hosting package which meets their needs. If a site is going down frequently, or it remains down for hours at a time, it might be smart to look into a new hosting company.
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