So your site was down. How does it affect your website ranking in search results? Well, the first thing to say is that if your site is temporarily down then it should not cause any worries. The search engine crawler will come again and in good faith many visits will be paid before your website is penalized. YUes, your website is penalized.

Even if after repeated attempts the crawler cannot find your website then the search engine do penalize a website. So how does the search engine penalizes a site which is down for an unacceptable length of time.  The search engine can omit the ranking in search results, lower the page ranking and take the site out of index. We feel that the action is taken in this order. It’s just logical because if the search engine knows that the site is down why include the site in the search results though it might remain available in index for longer time. Exclusion from index is taken as an extreme and last step.

So what happens when the site becomes available again? The recovery depends on the damage incurred. If the site has been removed completely from the index, then it may take a long time to regain the original position in page rank and search results. Though it might be still faster as compared to a new site attempting to gain a similar position.