Effects of server downtime on SEO

[danclarkie]

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Hey,

We all know that if your server is down a lot and frequently then google really doesn't like it.
Has anyone got first hand experience of this and or sources to that they could share to say how important server uptime is in terms of SEO

I have been doing SEO for a website and the server up/down time is pretty bad, I would like to be able to argue the case with some solid facts.

To give more context we are talking around 6 incidents (that I know of) in the last 2 months of between 1-5 hours each time.

My understanding is that google frowns upon this as its bad for user experience but also it drains google server resources as they try to crawl a site that doesnt exist and as a result you receive a penalty for this.

Could anyone provide any more input / links to sources etc ?

Cheers!

[melovemoney]

I have experienced server downtime to hurt my seo a little bit. A few times I have dripped slightly in rankings right after server downtime - maybe a week or so after. So it definitely effects your site although it usually isn't immediate.

[darrenb]

I had periods of downtime over the space of a month or so across all of my sites as they were shared hosting. The last downtime being a close to 48 hours so I changed host.

This happened a couple of months ago and I haven't noticed any negative effect on my sites in terms of positioning during or since the downtime.

[aaclapham]

One of my sites was down for 4 days and it dropped 8 places in Google - a week later it was back in its original position.