When your website gets indexed by Google it will be added to Google’s regular crawling. This means that Google will load pages from your site at a regular interval. If your website is popular (high traffic and many inbound links) it will be crawled more often than if it is seen as a less important site.

Google tries to adjust the crawling to hours to when it’s easier to access your site. If your site is seen as unreliable by Google you can be punished by losing positions in the search engine result pages. “Unreliable” can mean that your website is slow or that Google has had several issues with indexing your website.

If your site is completely down or responds with a server error page, Google will come back later and try again. After several attempts they will however give up and remove you from their index. In other words, you lose all the traffic you get from searches in Google.



Above: Graph showing how organic search traffic from Google can be affected if your site is dropped from the search index due to downtime.

Matt Cutts, a Google employee, and Vanessa Fox, a former Google employee, have said the following regarding Google indexing and downtime:

“Googlebot will try a few times before the pages drop from the index.” – Vanessa Fox

“As for how long it takes for a page to get back in once the site is back up, that really depends on a number of factors, such as how often the site is crawled in general.” – Vanessa Fox

“Sometimes temporarily down pages turn into truly-gone-forever pages, so we have to drop those pages at some point. But it’s also true that we go back and revisit those pages pretty often and try to recrawl them in case the site comes back up.” – Matt Cutts

It seems that depending on the size of your website, luck (!) and the type of issues you are having, anything can happen between nothing and being completely removed from Google’s index.

From all the discussions about this topic you can only come to one conclusion: uptime is very important if you don’t want to rely on pure luck.

What can I do?