When Google bot crawls your site, your site should not be down if not Google bot might think that all your pages are removed and no such site exists. When I went through a thread in Google groups, the query from bigmamaslings was

I’ve been having problems with downtime from my hosting company (am moving tomorrow as this is the final straw) and I’ve now practically disappeated from Google. I was in 3rd position for 5 of the more popular searches for my business and now - nothing.

and VanessaFox from google has replied that

If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again. In webmaster tools, do the pages you want indexed appear in the crawl errors section? If so, then Googlebot was unable to access them.
If you are moving the site to a new host and the pages are available the next time Googlebot tries to access them, then you should see them in the index again soon after that.

So down time can make differences in your business. Always be aware.

Mark

Tags : Google, Down time, Google Bot, Crawler

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.