Web server outages and site rank

[westcoast]

I joined my company just over a year ago & we were not indexed in any major search engine. After 6 months, I managed to get our site listed in the top 10 for 4 of our top 5 search terms. I was sure it wouldn't be much longer until we were listed in the top 3.

Then we had a denial of service attack & the total amount of downtime was 15 hours. The problem is that this coincided with the latest "Google dance" & we got absolutely hammered by this. All of our top listings dropped at least 40 spots each.

I'm sure over time we will move up like we did before but how much does that outage really affect our index placement?

Please advise!!! :confused:

[Chile]

Well, it does affect your placement because Google no longer sees the pages with the content. However, Google is stubborn, and does come back to the same pages even if they were missing for a short while. So, you will find your listing is given back after the googlebot finds the content again.

Right now, it might take a little while because the index is still in flux. Although it's not as random as it was a week ago, it tends to change back and then forth every other day, or so. With any luck, things will be cleared up in a month.

It's quite possible that your pages are still indexed, but because the index is rotating, you haven't been able to find them today.