Googlebot Cannot Access your Site, Does it Hurt SEO?

When a website crashes it can be a nightmare. All webmasters strive for 100% up time, but at some point it is very likely that the website will be down or inaccessible by Googlebot. We have had some downtime on Ignite Visibility. Mostly due to a cruddy server that Godaddy had us on. Boy was that a nightmare. But the real question here is if Googlebot cannot access your site, does it hurt SEO? The answer, it is all about how long it is down for.

“If it was just for a day, you should be in pretty good shape. If your host is down for 2 weeks then there is a better indicator that the website is actually down and we don’t want to send users to a website that is down. But we do try to compensate for websites that are sporadically down.” – Matt Cutts, head of Webspam at Google.

So as we can see, a short amount of downtime is normal online. So there is not much to worry about. But if you are offline for a long time, watch out, you could lose some rankings in Google.