Website glitches are an online brand’s worst nightmare, especially during periods of high site traffic and user volume. Often, an increase in site traffic can cause site malfunctions, especially during sales, cyber week, and – of course – the holiday season. But even if you properly prepare your site for an influx of user volume, issues with your site speed and function are sometimes inevitable.
However, when your site goes down it can be disruptive to business relative to converting leads to customers, boosting sales, and even building customer relationships. But more than that, unexpected site downtime or an extended period of being “offline” can actually hurt your rankings on Google.
Even once you finally secure that perfect position in the search engine results pages (SERPs), if your site experiences issues, it’s unlikely you’ll retain your place for too long. This is because search engines want to give users the best experience and only recommend reliable and operational websites. So if your site goes down, you can pretty much guarantee you’re not reaching users in the SERPs.
That being said, let’s take a look at the correlation between site downtime and search engine optimization (SEO) and how Google robots interpret your website when it’s offline.
If you’ve experienced issues with site downtime and a drop in rankings, you may be wondering who notifies Google when your site goes down. Googlebot (a website crawling robot) crawls your site to collect relevant data for indexing on Google’s search engine. When your site is down, Googlebot is met with an error code that informs it your site is non-operational.
Just like any other user that visits one of your site’s landing pages, the bot encounters a 500 internal error response.
The result: Recurrent 500 internal server errors affect tracked keywords negatively, even removing them from the top 20 positions. Also, Googlebot crawls such pages less frequently because of the possibility of receiving an error code. This can get worse if the site has longer periods of downtime.
Given the damage that site downtime does to ranking, how long offline is too long?
When Googlebot crawls your site and encounters an error, it will revisit the site after 24-hours to see if it’s come back online. If the error has been resolved within this 24-hour window, there likely won’t be a major impact on your site’s rankings.
However, it’s not unlikely that you’ll notice some fluctuations in your rankings anywhere from one to three weeks after the initial downtime. After this period, rankings will normalize and you will regain and retain your previous position among the SERPs.
With that being said, if Googlebot does find your site down time and time again, or over an extended period, it will ‘lose interest’ and focus on other sites that have a better end-user experience. Besides reducing the crawling frequency, intermittent downtime that stretches into days and weeks can result in your pages being de-indexed if Google interprets this downtime as permanent.
The reason websites with regular downtime and operation issues fall from their position in the rankings is because Google has a very clear mission: to provide a user-friendly experience and relevant, reachable content to its searchers. Even if your content may be perfect relative to a user’s search query, if your site is experiencing issues, Google will find a substitute for users.
In Google’s mission to find other relevant content within operational sites, the algorithm prioritizes ranking factors such as mobile responsiveness, bounce rate, and page speed. These factors affect how searchers interact with a page and contribute to their overal user experience.
No user wants to be directed to an inaccessible page. Not only is it disruptive to a user’s search, but this can also be damaging to the browser. The last thing Google wants is to hurt its online visitors and damage user experience by leading searchers to pages that are constantly down.
With so much competition in the digital space, it isn’t difficult for Google to find other bits of relevant content to a user’s search query. So, if you want to maintain your spot in the SERPs and ensure your content reaches target groups, here are a few tips:
If your website does go down, it (unfortunately) will hurt your rankings. However, if you are offline for just a few hours, this will not have any significant negative impact on your position. The key is to get things back up and running as soon as possible and take the necessary measures and precautions to prevent site downtime in the future.
However, downtime spanning days and weeks can make your top tracked keywords drop from the top 20 positions completely. Besides that, Googlebot will crawl the site less frequently and can even de-index the page if it judges the downtime as permanent.
Issues with website operation and function are sometimes inevitable. However, one thing that we can guarantee is our expert SEO strategies will get your brand in front of audiences and secure those top positions in the SERPs. If you want to spruce up your site function and boost your Google rankings, reach out to the team that can get it done. To learn more about Zero Gravity Marketing and our digital marketing services, get in touch with us!