Sites offline - dropped +50

[buzzman]

Hi,

My sites were offline last thursday for about 12 hrs due to a server problem, today all the sites on that server have moved +50 in the google SERPS. No need to say that this really s***ks big time, does anybody have a clue of this is a reason for a Google penalty and if so, if the penalties are long and hard for this?

[thepokerkeep]

Since the sites were only down for half a day, it's unlikely there's a penalty in place. Once Google re-visits your sites they should return to their prior rankings.

Don't panic. Give it a couple days.

This happened to me with a dns issue on my rakeback site a while back (was showing a page not found error)... once I got the problem straightened out, it was only a matter of a few days before things returned to normal.

[buzzman]

Do you think moving the sites to different servers might help?

[thepokerkeep]

Do you think moving the sites to different servers might help?

As long as you are not experiencing a lot of server down time you should be fine. However, if your servers are going down regularly, definitely move to a more reliable host. Google hates it when a site is offline at the time they visit, as you just witnessed with your sites, so consistent up-time is obviously very important.