Site drop in SERPS after domain down for three plus weeks

[highwayfive]

Have had a clients site that has been staple in the SERPS for the last four years that we have worked on it. However they had hosting issues a couple of months back which they didn't sort for two to three weeks. Since there the main keyword has bounced around between 24th and 44th in the google results.

The drop ties in with the hosting issue but the client does seem to believe that this is the source of the issue. Can someone point me towards some online articles that would explain this for them.

Some of the keywords have not suffered as badly but the one key term is still in the mid 20's.

I am sure it is suffering a minus 20 for the keyword as it was normally 4th or 5th in the results.

We don't host the site and the client had know idea were it was hosted. What is so annoying is that it is us who pointed out the site was down.

Thanks in advance everyone

[Dr-Pete]

I've seen more of this post-Caffeine. Now that Google is crawling/indexing faster, site outages can do a lot more damage. Being down for 3 weeks is definitely bad, and it's very likely you'll lost ranking.

It's rare to see any kind of manual penalty, and you should recover - it usually just takes time. You've got to get Google back in action - XML sitemaps (if you don't have them), building up some new links, etc.

This is a quick confirmation from 2006 - I'd say the problem is much worse now:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/server-outages-lead-to-drop-in-search-engine-rankings/3946/

The bigger argument is just that being down 3 weeks is a lot of lost sales, potentially. To not notice you're down and no know where you're hosted is unacceptable for any serious online business, IMO. I'd be wary of any client who cares that little about their business, to be perfectly blunt.

[highwayfive]

that should be stable and not staple although stapling a result high up in the SERPS would be good