During the past week, I had a server move internally and a moved to a server in new data center that required new nameservers. Both of these events caused several hours of downtime.
I found myself thinking, wouldn’t it be great if I could log into my Google WebMaster Tools and inform the Googlebot of these outages so that it a) wouldn’t send a Googlebot during this time period and b) would not draw conclusions based on the downtime. It’s an interesting idea, so I’ll invite Amanda Camp, Adam Lasnik, Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox to consider this idea for a future release.
That’s actually a very good idea David. I hope The Googlers above hear you. 🙂
Like the new site design BTW.
Thanks John! Long time no talk.
Adam Lasnik informed me yesterday that “short outages” like mine “should have no effect” – I told him they should make all of this more transparent via policy and that if nothing else, my idea would “bring comfort” to those having downtime.