Site Crash Effect On Traffic

[JSOC]

All,

I manage a site that unfortunately crashed due to a server issue in late October for about 3 hours.

Prior to the crash, traffic was the best it had ever been in the 3+ year history of the site. As you might expect, since the crash traffic has gone gradually down and is now about 15% off pre-crash numbers.

I understand that when a site crashes, it disrupts the crawling process and can disrupt traffic (in my case rich snippets were thrown off for days) but would love to hear experiences any of you have had in similar situations.

How much did traffic drop after a crash? When did it recover? Other thoughts?

Thanks,

John

[Personnel_Concept]

Well in some cases I have received messages from Google Webmaster notifications "Increase in Server Errors" where server didn't respond.

It is likely that server had an internal error or was busy when attempting to process these requests. Google recommends following in this case:

Recommended action

• Check the Crawl Errors page in Webmaster Tools.
• Check your scripts and script permissions.
• Examine the log files on the server for your site for scripts or pages that might be crashing.
• Consider addressing the load on your server.

Though personally in my case there was not much drop in traffic and rankings in Google remained consistent too..though will be interesting to see what other say.