So the long strange saga of security failures and downtime seems to be over. As of last night, the search engine spiders rediscovered my missing pages and once again included them within the index. After about ten days of total downtime and two weeks of being completely out of Google’s index, the pages in question are once again recognized and even ranking on the front page of some lucrative searches.
Things have been a little crazy around the house – its been spring cleaning and getting ready for art show sales all at once – so I can’t even say there was any action on my part that caused the indexing and high rankings to re-occur.
So, it quite possibly could have happened sooner if I had written more than a page a week or even if I had built up another half dozen links per week. The good news is obvious though: Problems created by downtime can be mostly fixed with a follow-up of stable uptime.
Comparing the SEO Effect
Prior to the downtime, I had a certain page ranking at about #18 for the one word keyword and #5 for the two word keyword. Obviously, it didn’t rank anywhere for about three and a half weeks (but it did manage to generate a handful of sales through directly linked traffic).
After the downtime, period of non-indexing, and now that its finally back up – its ranking about #13 for the one word keyword and #8 for the two word keyword.
The one-word and two-word keywords never moved together – it always seems like one has to go up for the other to go down (this probably means I need to add links using both variations as anchor texts).
Anyway, its good to know that a set-back like major downtime is more of a temporary loss than a permanent implosion. I still wouldn’t recommend taking your sites down for an extended period of time, but at least we know it isn’t complete website suicide!
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