Best SEO strategy for a site that has been down
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Because of hosting problems we're trying to work out, our domain was down all weekend, and we have lost all of our rankings. Doe anyone have any experience with this kind of thing in terms of
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how long it takes to figure out where you stand once you have the site back up?
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what the best SEO strategy is for immediately addressing this problem? Besides just plugging away at getting links like normal, is there anything specific we should do right away when the site goes back up? Resubmit a site map, etc?
Thanks!
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What most likely happened: Your site was offline, Search bots crawled the site and found nothing responding with a 404 error, or worse a 500 level error. There is a good chance that your site could have been crawled multiple times, and thus the search bots deemed your site gone, and thus your rankings fell.
The first and foremost thing you should do (and I assume you have) is restore your website. Being offline for only a few days should not have a long term effect on your rankings. It will simply take time for the search bots to recrawl all the links that you have built and determine that their is in fact a website on the other end of them again.
You should check webmaster tools for any errors and possibly ping your sitemap against the engines. Otherwise, I think it is best to carry on as normal, the rankings should return within a few weeks.
If I may be so bold, I would suggest looking in to a different hosting company, unless it was billing related, there is no excuse for going down for more than a couple of hours in today's market.
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Check out this thread from earlier today for some ideas:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/meta-tag-noindex-nofollow-by-accident
Definitely submit a new sitemap. This should qualify for a reconsideration through Google Webmaster Tools. The speed to be back up depends on the size of the site - it is my understanding that requests honored are back up within a week.
In the thread above... Ryan has a great tip about tweeting important links. That may be of interest to you. Certainly creating some sort of buzz on relevant sites like Twitter will bring some attention and get you back on track.
-John
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