Downtime doesn't just cost you sales. It costs you search traffic.
Google drops rankings for sites with repeated downtime. Learn how downtime affects crawl frequency, indexation, and rankings — and how to recover.
Google's crawlers visit your site on a schedule determined by your crawl budget — how often Google thinks your content changes and how fast your server responds. When a crawler hits a 5xx error or a timeout, Google notes it. A single failed crawl is harmless; Google retries. But repeated failures trigger a defensive response: Google reduces your crawl frequency to avoid wasting resources on a site that's often down, and for extended outages, it may temporarily drop pages from the index.
The timeline: a few minutes of downtime has no SEO impact. A few hours may cause a temporary crawl reduction. A 24+ hour outage can cause visible ranking drops and de-indexation. Google has stated that short, transient downtime is not a ranking factor, but extended or frequent downtime is treated as a quality signal — a site that's often unreachable is a poor search result.
The real SEO damage comes from repeated downtime, not a single incident. If Google's crawlers hit errors on 10% of their visits over a month, Google learns your site is unreliable and reduces crawl frequency permanently. Lower crawl frequency means slower indexing of new content, slower reflection of changes, and a competitive disadvantage — your competitors' new pages get indexed faster because their sites are more reliable.
This is why monitoring is an SEO investment, not just an operations one. A site that's up 99.95% of the time gets crawled more aggressively than a site that's up 99.0% — and 99.0% means 7+ hours of downtime per month, which is easy to accumulate without monitoring if you have intermittent failures you don't notice.
If you've had an extended outage and seen ranking drops, recovery is possible but takes time. First, get the site back up and verify it's serving correctly with an HTTP check — not just a 200, but the right content (use a keyword check). Second, submit your most important URLs to Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool and request re-indexing. This prompts Google to recrawl sooner than it would organically.
Third, check Google Search Console for crawl errors and fix any that accumulated during the outage. Fourth, be patient — rankings typically recover within 1-4 weeks after the site is reliably up, as Google's crawlers re-establish a normal crawl frequency. To prevent future damage, set up monitoring with SMS or push alerts so you know about outages in minutes, not hours, and keep your uptime above 99.9%.