[Advice] Site lost all search after hosting shut down for 3 days

SavyCon

SavyCon

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I had a hosting plan which had a high CPU usage on a small site, 4 years old and about 15,000 monthly uniques. Solely relied on SEO for the search, and brought in about $1,200 a year on autopilot. For some reason, the host took 3 days to turn back on my site and now the site is dead in the water (no views).

Any way to restore my keyword rankings in the SERPs? All advice is appreciated.

Thanks,

Savy
 
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As an update - it went down for 5 days in total, and I've gone and updated Google Webmasters to fix the crawl errors (403 forbidden)
 
After the first 24 hours, I would've used one of my site's backup copies to upload the files to a different host and then change the DNS records to point to the backup host until I figured out why my site was down for so long.

Anyway, I'm surprised to hear that as Google doesn't normally, at least from what I've seen, react that quickly to a site being down as they usually give the site quite a bit of time to come back up before they drop them from the SERPs. I even had a page on one of my sites that I changed the URL on maintain the same ranking for a week even though I forgot to 301 redirect the old URL to the new one.
 
Last edited:
You had to take action faster, by changing the host (at least temporarily). It might take some time now for your pages to start ranking again.
 
Something I forgot to mention in my last post is that on the page that lost ranking I was talking about, I was restructuring my URLs to organise them. There was another page that I originally ranked for in position 2 before I changed the URL and forgot to 301 redirect it (I actually had it 301 redirected at first, but the plugin I was using inexplicably stopped working) and a month after I fixed it, I managed to get my rank up to positions 5-6 after the page was removed from the SERPs.

So, I'm just letting you know that it's possible to regain your rankings, it just might take a bit of time. :)
 
I'm sure your rank will be restored if you give it some time. Would also be good to get a more reliable host and also if I was you I'd be sure to separate registrar, DNS and host then you have more flexibility to move each component if required.

Also make sure you always have off site backups for the same reason.
 
10 months later it will back, Google is just slow as shit these days.
 
This kind of similar issue I had faced with my hosting 2years ago, and from that time I always keep my sites backup to another hosting and use cloudflare to change DNS quickly.

If you've already submitted a fix request through GWT. Then all you can do is just wait.
 
1) Use Pingdom,

2) Then if not up in 12 - 24 hrs, transfer site to new host.

It should regain it's pos, but how long is another question...
 
I had my site down for 3 days. I lost rankings, but regain them after I got the site back up after a few days.
 
I also face this type of issue but in different way I was ran out of money and didnt pay for hosting for three months and my site dead (also loose access to data) for three months and loose all serp ranking.Than i buy a new hosting and make the site again with wayback and after about six to seven days it gain its position for primary kw not all kw ranked their position due to i was unable to submit my site map again to wt also all other kw are now ranking few slots below than they are before.
 
SavyCon said:
I had a hosting plan which had a high CPU usage on a small site, 4 years old and about 15,000 monthly uniques. Solely relied on SEO for the search, and brought in about $1,200 a year on autopilot. For some reason, the host took 3 days to turn back on my site and now the site is dead in the water (no views).

Any way to restore my keyword rankings in the SERPs? All advice is appreciated.
Thanks,

Savy
Click to expand...

Once you got the site live again did you check your URLs? are they absolutely similar to the old google indexed ones? if not you need to do a 301 redirect from the old to the new ones.
Next you can also try to do a search engine submission to speed up the process of re-indexing a bit quicker since you already are working with the webmaster tools.
Rest... give it some time and your rankings should be back in a few days.
 
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