Will a server outage cause a loss in Page Rank?

[nyc212]

I manage a PR6 website with lots of quality inbound and outbound links. On December 22, our hosting company (Interland/Web.com) apparently suffered a server outage FOR 8 DAYS!!

Customer service was worthless. For eight days they refused to offer any constructive assistance, let us know when the problem would be resolved, or move our site to their working servers.

Now that they finally moved us to another set of servers the site is online again. However, I see that all pages - except our homepage - have a zero PR. We've lost all PR we've gained over 3 years.

Any ideas what is happening here or how we can get it back?

Thanks.

 

[whitebark]

It might be the cause. My main site was down for 20 of 30 days in Oct/Nov because the host refused to fix my dedicated server and the PR went unchanged with the latest update.

should have also added - they might be thinking that you were purchasing links - often a reason for a sudden a drastic drop in pr. Check your backlinks as they are now - someone(competitor) may have put your website link into a bunch of bad neighbourhoods.

 

[nyc212]

thanks for the feedback... will look into it..

 

[shockie]

i don't think a server outage of 8 days can cause such a significant drop in pagerank, and it looks a lot more like a penalty to me as roy suggested.

if it had dropped to at least a pr1, i would say that the server outage lead to a large number of dropped backlinks to your site, although that would be unlikely since you were only offline for a short period of time.

 

[enlytend]

Could very well have been due to the outage happening during the quarterly TBPR update - You said all EXCEPT your homepage went to PR0 - wouldn't those other pages have gotten most of their PR through internal linkage? If so, those links wouldn't have been found while the site was down.

Make sure your most important external inbound links are still there. Then, as long as you weren't buying links, I wouldn't worry about it - you should bounce right back on the next update.

 

[nyc212]

enlytend - I think you hit the nail on the head.

Yes, home page still at PR6. All other pages at PR0 (which had been at PR5 and PR6 prior to December 22).

A TBPR update during the outage would have missed all pages except possibly the home page, as after 4 days of being offline the domain was temporarily re-directed to a single page on another server.

There are no purchased links. All links earned legitimately and all external inbound links still in place.

It makes sense to me that this PR issue will be resolved after next TBPR update. Fingers crossed.

Thanks to all who have assisted me in this thread.