I’ve been on page one of Google for my top two search terms for over a year now.

As you can imagine, being top of page 1 in Google’s SERPs brings in a lot of business. Today my positions look like this:

• freelance copywriter – Google UK – No 2 on page 1
• freelance copywriter – Google entire web – No 2 on page 1
• freelance copywriting – Google UK – No 3 on page 1
• freelance copywriting – Google entire web – No 3 on page 1 

My site was completely offline in early November for whole week because of hosting problems. But despite being completely invisible for seven days it held onto its ranking.

In contrast I didn’t get my personal art gallery site – decor-works.co.uk – up and running again until a fortnight after it disappeared. It has temporarily vanished from the listings.

It’s useful to know that if your site goes belly up for a week it’ll probably be OK. But if you leave it much longer you’ll have a lot more SEO work to do to get it back where it was before things went dog-shaped.

Search engines place great importance on fairness. I can only imagine that the reason my freelance copywriting site retained its ranking for week is because it would be horribly unfair for Google to de-rank it immediately without giving me a chance to re-instate things.

Thank you,  Google! XXX