Well you might be thinking: "Doh, you don't say, if my server is down then I don't get traffic!".
Well I will forgive your sarcasm!
Well I should not assume that you would come out with such a thing, but I would not blame you if you did. BUT there is a much more serious side to this.
You see that according to Vanessa Fox of Google, if your website is down when the Google bot comes to visit your site, then the bot will report that the site is no longle on the internet and should be removed from the index.
Yes, that is right - it will be removed.
So even if you get the site back up after a few hours, if the Google bot cam to visit while it was down, your coveted page one position will disappear! Consequently you are going to take a big bash in your traffic.
Now this is only a temporary situation, when the google bot comes back and sees your site again, your position will get restored. Just how this downtime will effect your google rating when you get restored is unclear at present, but obviously if it happens too often it will not be good for you.
So it may happen to you once or twice a month. What can you do?
First, you need to know fast when the site is down. The quicker you know, the quicker you can get it up and the less likely will it be that the g.bot has visited and found no-one at home. (well no home, not even the drive way, would be more accurate)
Now you can not sit hitting the refresh button every 5 minutes to check that your website is up - you have better things to do with your life. But you can get an automatic service to do the checking for your. There are several that do it here are some:
host-tracker.com
siteuptime.com
You can Google search for more of the.
The second part of your defense strategy is to get the g.bot back as soon after you have got back up again. This is just in case you were visited while you were down.
You can do that pretty easily, just go to one of your regular high profile posting websites, like EZA or a high PR blog website and post an article or blog post with a back-link to your site. As soon as it is online, bookmark it at a couple of places, and the g.bot will come scuttling back to your site pretty quickly.
