Houston Company Needs Help (Will Our SEO Work Be Destroyed While Site is Down?, Can Anything be Done?)

[inhouseninja]

I'm a Moz member, mostly just lurk, and love the Moz community. I work at a non profit company that does benchmarking data and helps school districts improve process in education.

Our building flooded and our site is currently offline, is there anything we can do to stop/lesson any SEO page rank drop between now and when we are back up?

We have worked very hard to get these rankings. I know it is minor compared to all tragedy in Houston, but we have worked hard to get these SEO gains (YEAH MOZ!) and I'd hate to lose them because of Harvey.

Any suggestions, assistance appreciated!

Ralph

[randfish]

Our hearts are with you and the whole city/region. Glad to hear the outage is shorter than expected, and certainly let us know if we can help more.

[inhouseninja]

Thanks so much Rand. We are hoping to up next Monday so it will only be a week. I was concerned because on conference call yesterday I was told 4 weeks(our offices flooded and we had not transitioned to cloud completely and our back servers had issues as well). I really appreciate the responses guys. It might not seem like alot, but it means a great deal to a guy stuck in his house, not flooded, but surrounded by water.

Moz is a great community!!

[randfish]

You might want to check out https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance

Depending on the length of the expected downtime, a 503 is probably the way to go (and will tell Google it's a temporary issue).

Congrats on the rankings gains BTW! Nice work!

[LureCreative]

I don't imagine the site being down will hurt your SEO work or rankings. If it has to be down for multiple weeks you may see your rankings drop, but once it is live again you can request Google to re-index your website in Google Search Console using the "Fetch and Render" tool. I don't expect there to be a lasting negative SEO impact.