Feb 19th, 2007
Dropped From Google Because of Site Down Time?
This may seem unfair to many people and quite obvious to others, but if, for whatever reason, your site is down when Google comes around to index your site, your site will get deindexed because of it (or at least your rankings will drop significantly). The reasoning for this is fairly obvious: Google’s job is to give people the most relevant results to their searches and if the number one ranked site is down, it would seem they failed on giving relevant results.
You don’t need to worry too much about this though unless you find your site down quite frequently. If, on rare occasion, your site experiences a few seconds/minutes of downtime, the liklihood of the search engine indexing your site at that precise moment is very small, and Vanessa Fox from Google says “Googlebot will try a few times before the pages drop from the index. 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.”
Do I need to request reinclusion if this happens to me?
No. Reinclusion is only for sites that have been deindexed for not following regulations or guidelines. You just have to wait for a bot to come by and index your site again.
Bottom line: If you find your site is constantly down, get new hosting.