Penalties for site going down often?

[iAnalyst.com]

I have a client with a site that ranks for some very competitive terms who consistently has server issues and the site goes down for a day at a time. Each time this happens his site seems to drop in site wide rankings and then stay there for months without ever fully recovering. Only part of the rankings are usually recovered.

Has anyone else seen this trend? Is it something Google keeps on record without fully removing any penalty addressed?

[KeriMorgret]

Does the server return a 503 not available when it goes down at least? Or is it somehow set to show a 404? You want to make sure it's showing a 503 to the bots so they know the server is down and not that the pages have been removed.

[firstconversion]

Yep, I dont think its a penalty as such, its just what happens when you disappear from the rankings - maybe they wait for re spidreing of the whole site to return traffic. I have worked with 2 large sites that have this happen a few times and recovery takes a few weeks to get back to pre-downtime levels (where downtime is significant 1- 3 days)

[seanmccauley]

I believe that Google do take this into account, though the effect you describe here is quite marked. Google will rightly see your client's site as providing a poor customer journey is letting them down by being down when they have suggested it as a good source for keyword destination. Therefore they will penalise. Can they not solve server issues?