SEO implications of network outage

[Dave392]

Hi,

Our bandwidth provider has informed us of a forthcoming network outage this weekend, the net result being that around 20 websites will be unreachable for a total of about 1 hour inside a predetermined 3 hour window.In an ideal world we would like to provide a holding page or be able to respond with a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" HTTP code, however the complete absence of connectivity means we'll be unable to do this.Does anyone have any ideas about the SEO implications of this kind of downtime? It would be useful to know if there are any actions we can take prior to the outage that could mitigate the impact. We've considered repointing the DNS to other servers, but it's only something we'll do if the negative impact of not doing it is too great.Thanks in advance!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Nope, a one hour downtime should not affect your rankings. Here is Matt Cutts on the subject.

A) Crawler may not even detect the downtime

B) If downtime is detected, crawler will check back later to see if it is a serious problem. Your site would be back up by then and shouldn't affect rankings.