Minimizing Downtime
To get really good search engine placements, you need to be consistent with what it is you are showing, yet dynamic with the fine details. An example of this is an online store. Everytime the spider comes back, they see a store selling a particular type of goods, but each time they come back, the goods are changed. New specials, new products, altered prices and altered content keep things fresh, while the similar feel keeps things stable.
So what happens when a spider comes to a site and sees an under construction page or a PHP error message? You can imagine that it’s not pretty. Try to keep your sites up as much as possible to keep the search engine spiders aware of what’s going on. Even 5 seconds of downtime can be bad if those 5 seconds are the window that the spider arrives in.
