What happens when my site is down for a few hours and google spiders

[robnollie]

Our server is being re-located to a new building this weekend and we want to ascertain what harm, if any having the site unavailable will have if the google spider visits.

I have had all sorts of replies from it being a disaster to simply that the spider will try again in a few days.

The site has been up for nearly 3 years and has PR of 6. My gut feeling is that sites being unavailable for a period of time must be something google understands as a fact of internet life and wuld only de-list a site if it was repeatadly unavailable. Any views?

[JohnW]

You don't really say enough to give a solid answer. The answer I can give is that this will depend on how long the server is down and how any IP/DNS changes are handled. DNS problems could keep the site down for much longer than the server is down.

[PhilC]

Google doesn't drop pages on the strength of them not being available for a short time. They are well aware that servers go down, and they don't drop pages until they've been unable to fetch them for a while. A weekend's outage shouldn't make any difference. It's surprisingly hard to get Google to drop a page.