SEO and Server Down

[johnafrankllin]

As it is evident that no server serving 100% uptime, but only guarantees the 99.99% uptime. What affect can be seen by this .01% of down time.
as today i have noticed a more than 4 hours of server down where my sites are hosted.
Does it going to affect badly in SEO point of view?
If a server is down once every week or moth for 10-15 mintues, what affect it can produce? (of course the point of view is SEO)

[Bagi Zoltán]

The server uptime may effect the rankings. OWG said that the negativ effect depends of the google trust, so more trust less drop. The website loading time influances the rankings as well since the crawling robots must represent the welfare of the Internet users.

[livetech]

Interesting thought, and something which happened to me recently.

One of our websites (which, incidentally wasn't hosted on one of our servers ) was down for about a day. It did drop in the SERPS by about 10 positions, but after a couple of days was back to where it was. We have been doing a lot of SEO work on it to expand the marketplace for where it was based, and the SERPS it fell for was for the market where it was expanding into. The SERPS for the market it was well ranked, constantly specialising in was fine.

So it can seem to have an effect, but like Pagerank/relevance/keywords and everything else in SEO, it doesn't have a huge effect, but is simply a factor that contributes to it.

[OldWelshGuy]

yep, if you have been doing SEo work on it then it can have an affect, same as if you have added a load of content and the site becomes unavailable. Google trust plays a fair part in their algorithm now, which is why old well known domains work so well.

[tb987]

It is possible to get 100% uptime, but you need to have geographically distributed replicated web servers. You can get close to 100% with Content Delivery Networks provided by the likes of Akamai. Most pople think that dedicated servers will give them better reliability, but the opposite is true. Generally, shared hosting is on fully redundant kit and much more reliable i.e. load balanced servers, firewalls, redundant firewalls etc. You need to check this though as you might just be buying some space on someone's dedicated server. So is shared hosting better from an SEO perspective? What about the shared Ips?

[djpassion]

Defo true, i was using php4 for my sites for nearly two years but a few months ago went from php4 to php5 fastcgi but kept getting 404/500's on my my sites now and again and noticed that i lost serps because of it. So i changed to php5 w/o fastcgi and the serps come back and havent dropped since. So yeah gotta have good uptime etc

Downtime every now and then doesn't affect SERP rankings much. One of my site was down for almost two days straight due to a DDOS attack (hosting provider took it down after first two hours of attack, didn't bring it up online until two days had passed) and it didn't affect the SERP ranking much. Consistent long period of downtime is what will affect your site's ranking adversly in my opinion.

[stefan_w]

Old sides the more sunny falling out trouble. Newer sides the unstable server a side may cause problems because he does not the side yet the google inside his system.

[djpassion]

Originally Posted by stefan_w

Old sides the more sunny falling out trouble. Newer sides the unstable server a side may cause problems because he does not the side yet the google inside his system.

tbh that didnt make sense to me whatsoever lol

[OldWelshGuy]

Originally Posted by dman_2007

Downtime every now and then doesn't affect SERP rankings much. One of my site was down for almost two days straight due to a DDOS attack (hosting provider took it down after first two hours of attack, didn't bring it up online until two days had passed) and it didn't affect the SERP ranking much. Consistent long period of downtime is what will affect your site's ranking adversly in my opinion.

I will use an offline analogy (as I always do).

Lets say that you use taxis regularly. let's say that you have used the same taxi company for years and years, they have never let you down, they have always given good service.

OK let's say that one night, you are out, the taxi doesn't turn up.

The next day you call the taxi company furious and they apologise saying the car had a crash, so they couldn't do anything about it!

Do you believe them?
---------------------------------

You start to use a taxi company, you pulled them from the book, called them, they didn't turn up for the return journey.

Do you bother calling them the next day?
If you do, and they tell you their car had a crash, do you believe them?
If you DO believe them, do you believe them the same as you did the first company scenario?

the answer is most certainly NO! The reason is because you had no history with the second company, they let you down and you had NOTHING in the trust bank to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe them.

Same with Goolge and downtime.