In a recent blog post, we speculated whether hosting stability could affect post indexing (and how to get reindexed), and whether that played a role in some of the problems my site faced with Penguin 2.0.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Web Spam Team (and thus SEO), weighed in on a similar question:
"I got a "Googlebot can't access your site" message in Webmaster Tools from my host being down for a day. Does it affect my rankings when this happens?"
Here's what Matt had to say about whether or not hosting down time could affect your SEO.
I think that's a handy tip he gave about knowing whether or not the reported problem is a real problem or a reporting problem.
The three month span during which I was having verifiable hosting stability issues and facing an obnoxious amount of "500 errors" (server resource issues) visibly show up in my traffic graph. After all, why would Google want to send people to a site that might not even be there?
Fortunately though, smaller, more transient hiccups, don't generally cause a problem. Servers are set up to give Googlebot a particular error code that Googlebot interprets as "try again later". This gives us a lot of wiggle room which is fortunate when our hosting acts up as it will from time to time!