Server crashed - What should I do regarding Google SERP´s?

[ceci2710]

We have several travel websites in Uruguay since 2003.

These sites have a very high PR and Trust. The server where all our sites are hosted has crashed and we have been for 2 days now trying to fix all this mess. We hope this problem will be fixed today.

Please I really need to know what should I do regarding Google. I mean one of our sites has been ranking in top 1 positions for more than 150 keywords. Will we loose all that? What can we do about it? It´s the first time this has happened to our sites.

[Francisco_Meza]

Hi Cecilia, my client's site crashed for a couple days too, but this was about 1 year ago. Actually it was an attack (DDoS). Our rankings disappeared, but once I was able to get the site back up, most of our rankings came back to were they were before immediately. If I remember correctly, I think we were offline for 2 days and completely recovered within 1 week. The reason I think it took one week was it took Google a week to come back to my site and crawl it.

My advice: Don't worry too much about it. Your rankings should come back because it's an algorithm.

[ceci2710]

Hi Francisco,

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. We are really very worried about this issue.

Do you think it´s a good idea, once the sites are up to submit the URLs using Webmastertools - Fetch as Google option?

Maybe that way we can get crawled again in less time?

Thanks!

[Delete2012]

Sorry to hear about that. A few things to consider when you're choosing your server location is that if you are targeting to Uruguay, the server should probably be physically sitting in Uruguay (with clean IP).

I would say that it would be necessary to fetch/submit after the problems have been corrected. Things like this happen, all the time - to everyone, even the best. If you lost ranking - you'll get them back in no time just continue to produce good quality and you'll be fine

[Francisco_Meza]

I resubmitted the sitemap in GWT once everything looked right.

My answer is yes.

[Francisco_Meza]

I don't think this is necessarily true. "IF" her target market is in the US, then maybe the server should be in the US. "IF" her target market is specifically located in Uruguay, then yes perhaps the server should be in Uruguay.

If she is international SEO like me, then she should have a good web hosting company that can handle the load.

[KeriMorgret]

It may be too late for this, but this is a useful post about what to do if you know in advance you need to take your server down. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance