Does anybody know how Google.com penalizes for site being down and how to remove that penalty?

Question

For some reason after my website went down for around 5 hours due to the problems with the network at my hosting provider, it disappeared from Google organic search results. I was listed on the 4th page of Google.com results for “cheapest airfare” keyword and had lots of sales coming from that. Now I have no idea what to do to get my site back into Google. My website is a legal reputable business. I have never broken any rules and I can’t really blame hosting because networks do go down and servers do brake once in the while. My hosting provider is also a good reputable business.

Does anybody know how Google.com penalizes for site being down and how to remove that penalty?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

I have a hard time believing that your site was removed from the SERP because of a 5 hour network downtime.  Search results can be highly fluid at times, especially if Google is in the midst of an algorithmic update.

If you happen to have a Google SOAP API key (kind of far-fetched as they stopped issuing them in late 2006, but a possibility) - you can use http://googlerankings.com to check to see your current position without having to sift through everything manually. I would suspect that your site was either pushed up or down in Google's index rather than it was removed in its entirety.

Did you try:

site:yoursite.com in Google to see if you're still indexed?

If you know that you haven't been doing anything shady regarding optimization, I would sweat it out for a day or two & see if things show back up.  If not, I would try the other options that have been listed here previously.

Answer 2

There is no reason for the website to have been removed after only 5 hours. Google's bots will remove a website from the listings if it repeatedly attempts to visit the site but can't. In order to have your site re-indexed by Google, either submit your site (if you haven't already) to be checked via Google Webmaster Tools. If you're already signed up to that portion of the google site, then just click "Re-index."

Google Webmaster Tools:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Your site may have been removed for other reasons, use this website to check and see if your website is banned by Google. If that is the case then it will provide you with information on how to fix the situation.

Check To See If Your Website Is Banned On Google:

http://www.iwebtool.com/google_banned