All pages were returning 404 for an hour. Will it impact the SERPS?

[lucasms]

Hi,

Due to a bug in my website system, all the pages were returning an 404 default page for a period of 1 hour. Can this event impact the SERPs of this site? (the site is heavily visited, more than 500k users coming from google every day, so I assume google crawls my pages every moment)

[JarnoNijzing]

Dear Lucas,

it all depends on the fact if Google/Bing visited/crawled your website in that specific hour. If your website is receiving 500K visitors each day from Google and your websites spits out 404 pages for just an hour I don't think it will impact the rankings at all.

A client website of mine receives about 20K visitors each day, same sort of problem, due to a mistake he made his homepage was shut down for 2 days, Google bot had visited 2 times but the rankings were the same and webmaster central even gave us a notice of the problem.

I think you should be just fine.

What if the website of microsoft went offline due to a server error, electric pulse or something like that, i don't think that will impact their rankings at all.

just my 2 cents on the matter

Regards

Jarno

[masdigitalmedia]

Beyond the crawl... if a user is searching via key term to your site and the user gets a an error, that can certainly have an impact.  You mentioned 500K Google search users could be impacted, so I would not be surprised if you don't notice a bounce.  Moving forward, you may want to consider a Content Distribution Network service.  If your main site goes down, the cached site can still be accessed by users.  With the amount of traffic you mentioned, you'll need to do some research on this, but it may be a way to mitigate this risk in the future.  Best of luck.

[lucasms]

Hi,

The GWT crawl errors section is now showling lots of my pages that were affected with the 404 error code. But these pages (most of them) are still in the serps. It seems their position were not affected.

[Everett]

If it was just an hour I don't think you have anything to worry about. In the future you may want to look into serving a 500 code instead when the site goes down.