As SEO consultants we know how much time and efforts it might take to achieve high positions for a site sometimes. That is why after receiving desired ranks being excluded from Google index because of the site’s being down during the Google bot crawling it is twice more unpleasant.

A thread from the updated Google Groups points out that

I’ve been having problems with downtime from my hosting company (am moving tomorrow as this is the final straw) and I’ve now practically disappeared from Google. I was in 3rd position for 5 of the more popular searches for my business and now - nothing.

It’s hard to imagine the disappointment of that site owner from his site being removed from Google’s index. But Vanessa Fox from Google confirms that if the site is down and its pages are inaccessible for Google crawler, then it might lead to exclusion from Google index.

If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again. In webmaster tools, do the pages you want indexed appear in the crawl errors section? If so, then Googlebot was unable to access them.

The good thing to know about this is that you shouldn’t request site reinclusion. Google will automatically continue trying to access your pages and as soon it founds them, they will be back in Google index.

You’re right that requesting reinclusion is only for sites that have violated the guidelines. This isn’t the situation in your case, and there’s no need to contact us to let us know that your site has moved and is available again, as Googlebot will keep rechecking for it automatically.

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