Unreliable access to one’s website when spiders come crawling could result in being dropped from a search engine’s index.
Downtime can be scarier than any Halloween spookiness for a site publisher. While search engines like Google will send their indexing spiders around multiple times to a site, too many inaccessible results due to downtime could be interpreted as a site that no longer exists.
Getting dropped from Google could make that non-existence very real. A recent post at Royal Pingdom cited the danger of downtime, with the corresponding effect of vanishing from Google’s index, ruining whatever SEO work has been done until the spiders come back for a return visit.
They cited Matt Cutts on a previous comment about downtime, where he noted that Google does try to go back and recrawl pages it has dropped previously, in case the site has returned. Rather than relying on Google’s return after dropping pages, webmasters need to keep an eye on their sites for downtime issues.
Pingdom modestly suggests its service as one of any number of options for monitoring a service. Site publishers will also want to check out Google’s Webmaster Central and the site tools they make available.
