How Long To Recover Rankings After Multi-Day Site Outage?

[smaavie]

Hi,

A site we look after for a client was down for almost 3 days at the start of this month (11th - 14th of May, to be exact).

This was caused by my client's failure to verify their domain name in accordance with the new ICANN procedures. The details are unimportant, but it took a long while for them to get their domain name registration contact details validated, hence the outage.

Very soon after this down time we noticed that the site has slipped back in the Google rankings for most of the target keywords, sometimes quite considerably. I guess this is Google penalizing this client for their failure to keep their site live. (And they really can't have too many complaints about this, in my opinion).

The good news is that the rankings show signs of improving again slightly. However, they have not recovered all the way to where they were before the outage, two weeks ago.

My question is this ... do you expect that the site will naturally re-gain the previous excellent rankings without us doing anything? If so, how long do you estimate this could take?

On the other hand, if Google typically penalizes this kind of error by 'permanently', is there is anything we can do to help signal to Google that the site deserves to get back up to where is used to be?

I am keen to get your thoughts, and especially to hear from anyone who has faced a similar problem in the past.

Thanks

[GPainter]

Are you sure it's Google, have you also check back links as sometimes it's not just Google crawling your site but other robots and if they find its not working you may get removed as well which in turn can lower your DA, The one thing you need to be with Google is patient so I tend to give most things a month or so having said that no harm in doing some social etc. making sure Google knows you're site is still there and there to stay make your self active a bit.

good luck!

[KevinBudzynski]

A site down for 2-3 days (from an isolated incident) shouldn't drop you much at all in organics (according to a 2010 video by Matt Cutts).  Longer than that, you could be in trouble. Chris is right, look at your link profile and I would update content a bit.

[smaavie]

Thanks for your answers Chris and Kevin, I really appreciate it.

Chris, please forgive my ignorance, but how should I check back links? What tools do I need and what should I be looking for?

Many thanks

[GPainter]

Hiya,

You can use open site explorer

or https://www.majesticseo.com/

and the  final or

https://ahrefs.com/

in most of the programs you will see "lost" links these are links that have dropped so you can go to webmasters in an attempt to regain them etc.

Good luck!

[smaavie]

Thanks Chris,

I appreciate these links.

I can't see an option for view 'lost' links in Open Site Explorer, but ahrefs.com has been very useful so far.

Cheers!

[GPainter]

Sorry doesn't look to have that feature, i don't tend to use it for that but moth majestic and ahrefs do.