Earlier in the month my server crashed and a few of my websites hosted on there were down for over 1 week.  As you can imagine this was very distressing, I had been working on these sites for 4-6 months.  Continuously building links and adding new content.  Over night my traffic had dropped to 0 (not much surprise here) an my search engine rankings also dropped out of the top 1000.  I was pretty pissed off at this but there was nothing I could do except concentrate on getting my websites back up and running and to continue my link building and content creation.

I have never had a website down for such a long amount of time.  I thought it would be interesting to see how quickly a website can regain its rankings and traffic.  The results have been quite surprising.

Below you will see a graph charting 2 of my keyword rankings for 1 website which was down, you should be able to tell when my website went down and clearly see my rankings bounced back up once the website was accessible again.  This is very pleasing for me, I haven’t really lost too much rankings and traffic is slowly climbing back up.

[image width=”600″ height=”” link=”https://outsprung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Keyword-1-graph1.png” lightbox=”true” title=”Keyword Position Before And After Website Down Time”]https://outsprung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Keyword-1-graph1.png[/image]

[image width=”600″ height=”” link=”https://outsprung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Keyword-traffic-1-graph.png” lightbox=”true” title=”Traffic Before And After Website Down Time”]https://outsprung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Keyword-traffic-1-graph.png[/image]

If your website goes offline for any amount of time, concentrate on getting your website online but do not neglect your link building.  Keyword 2 was even higher placed than before the website went down.  I believe this is because I continued to build links.  I thought i would be penalised quite badly for having a website down for 10 days but this is not the case.