Server Down for Few Hours went from Page 1 to Page 6?

[webdesigncwd]

We were on Page 1 - our server went down for about 4-6 hours and then we dropped to page 6. Would the server being down for this amount of time affect our position?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[RobertFisher]

From my experience it would not. Even in a highly competitive area, if you had no more than a six hour outage I just dont sees that kind of move. Another thing to look at is you say you went from pg 1 to  pg 6. For one keyword/page or for every page on the site?

To me,  If the server going down caused you to lose rank it would be diffuse and all pages would feel at least some effect. I have had a server out for nearly two days due to a poor server farm, we did not see much change in our sites.

Hope this helps. If you could give more info ( a url ) we could be more definitive.

[UnderRugSwept]

Something similar happened to us. It was because Google decided to try to crawl the site at the exact time it was down--wouldn't you know it! Our home page got completely removed from the index. Then, about a week or two later, when the next crawl occurred, it was right back in it's original position, which happens to be #1. My advice is not to start panicking unless it doesn't go back after the next crawl.

[webdesigncwd]

This post is deleted!

[RobertFisher]

Were these all individual pages or was your homepage ranking for all three?

If the site being down occurred as Marisa suggested, you could go into GWMT and request a crawl. You can also look and see when you were last crawled. But, I still doubt that is the issue.

Best.

[webdesigncwd]

These were all homepage rankings, it looks like it went down when Google tried to crawl our site.

Thanks for all your help

[webdesigncwd]

Thanks Marisa appreciate your advice.:)

[BobbyZang]

Did you ever recover your rankings?

Same thing just happened to me except it was about a 5 to 10 ranking drop for all of our pages.

[webdesigncwd]

No improvement yet