Web Page downtime is a SEO killer

You’ve done all the work, created the site, done excellent job on on-page and off-page SEO, everything is ready for you to have a great Google page rank and enjoy the fruits of your labour on SEO. But, have you considered how much your hosting solution is influencing your SEO rank? Today we’re looking into how vps hosting uptime or downtime affects your site’s rankings.

Faster loading sites make happy visitors

Since April 2010 Google has included site speed, the measure of how quickly a website responds to web requests, in their ranking algorithms reflects. It does not contribute a lot to the final result, but Google has made it clear that they recognize that “faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

But, that is not the only factor that you can influence by your hosting choice, which will eventually influence how your page is being ranked and perceived by customers. Another, even more important one is uptime/downtime of your website. Downtime refers to the periods of time when your webpage is unavailable, either because of some kind of error, maintenance or any other reason. Everyone in this business is concerned about the downtime, because it creates losses, both in financial and reputation sense, and all measures should be taken to avoid downtime.

But, you probably have not considered how much downtime can affect your page rank and index on Google. It makes perfect sense: Google ranks pages on the data it gathers during crawling of the site. If the so-called search engine robots cannot access your site, then Google is not able to rank or index it.

Google’s reaction to your page not being accesible to the robots depends greatly on how long the downtime is. They do not want to keep dead sites in their search results, but also they do not want to throw away sites that’ll be back in a few seconds. So, if a crawler cannot find a site, it will come back again soon to see if the site is back up, and it will continue trying the site several times. While the crawler tries to enter the site, it’s page rank might drop quite a lot temporarily, but will not be completely removed from Google’s index. If it continues for a longer period, ie. days, Google will conclude that the page does not exist any more and it will disappear from the index. And, after your site is gone from the index, it takes a lot of SEO knowledge and work to put it back in, and reach your previous ranking.

Good news is that Google is quite forgiving when it comes to temporary downtime, but bad news is that longer downtimes can substantially influence your page rank, which is something that should be considered when choosing the hosting solution,  for your webpage. If you choose a service that has half-decent uptime/downtime ratio, your SEO efforts could be gravely affected if the server’s downtime does not allow Google robots to crawl your site. Why risk it, if you know that KnownHost offers you the guarantee that the uptime of your site will be always above 99,9%, and the sites we are hosting right now have the industry leading uptime of more than 99,98%? Additionally, if you decide to upgrade your hosting services with us, it will be done without any downtime that could cause serious effect on your Google page rank.

Interested to know more?  Watch at this link why downtime affects ranking.

sources : googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

hyperspin.com/en/ranking.php?type=2&i=10&d=90&s=10

youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qXrwyTGOf1E