Today's question comes from Pierre Far in London, who asks--
My website was down for a couple of days and now has lost all of its Google rankings.
What can I do to get them back?
Well, the short answer is make sure that you put your website back up, make sure that it's got reliable uptime. and make sure that all the pages that were there before are still there.
So there's a tension at Google, where when a page goes away-- maybe there's a 404-- we don't know whether it's really gone away or whether that page will be back.
Sometimes there's a server timeout-- the server is kind of slow.
And so on one hand, you don't want to keep showing a page that would be a bad user experience, like it's really gone away.
On the other hand, it's very common for websites to go down for an hour, two hours, a day, two days.
And so you also want to give the benefit of the doubt, so you can revisit those pages and see whether they've gone up.
So we do have different varying time periods, where we basically allow-- if a domain looks like it's gone away but it comes back, it's back online, then we just say, OK, it was a transient error.
So the short and simple advice is just go ahead and make sure that you put the website up back the way it was, and hopefully things should recover relatively quickly.