Can unreliable server hurt your serps?

[xoffie]

Hi

I have a small personal blog about food and wine that I recently moved from blogger to wordpress and it is currently being hosted by the company who moved the blog over from one system to the other.

This week I've noticed an 80% drop in organic traffic thanks to losing pretty much every first page SERP, there's no messages in WMT, i dont pay for links, all that's on the site is original content about food and wine that I enjoy. I've never had a previous drop in ranking/traffic like it.

The one thing I can say, is that the guy who took over the hosting is hosting it himself on his own server and the website has been down more times than I would consider reasonable, often for hours at a time (this is when I catch it and I don't check often).

1. Would the site be penalised for this?

2. If I move servers to a reliable co i normally use, how long will it take to recover?

[GrowthHackingGooglesIndex]

I can watch soft 404 errors increase and know there will be a week to two week period with lower SERP scores.

They absolutely can affect your campaign.

[GaryVictory]

Hi agree with both Andy and Michael.

If you are going to ditch which seems an unreliable server, make sure your new platform delivers speed. This article by KISSmetrics highlights it's importance http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

Good luck

Gary

[MickEdwards]

If the server keeps going down I would also look at and consider page load speed - http://www.webpagetest.org/ because if it is that flaky I would guess performance is poor all round.

I would get to a stable server as quick as possible.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Google has said in the past that the odd outage shouldn't be a problem, but if it is like you are saying, then yes, this could be very harmful. Matt Cutts said that if every time someone comes to your site it is down, then it will have a negative impact.

Recovery is a very open-ended question though. It could be a week, a month or 3 months - there is no way to determine this sadly and anything here is going to be guesswork.

I would say to move the site as soon as you can.

-Andy