What Happens When a Blog Shuts Down for 24 Hours?

Over the weekend, readers hoping to catch some cow slinging from our hay eating friend were rudely redirected to to this blog. The redirect lasted a whole day and created a lot of buzz and speculation. The most logical explanation was I acquired the blog so the person suing the cow would think twice about suing someone who has the means to defend himself.

At the end of the day, this turned out to be a piece of linkbait. There was no lawsuit and the forwarding of the domain was to help add to the drama. Another reason for the domain forwarding was we wanted to see the effect on a blog after it’s been gone for 24 hours. What happens to the traffic when the site comes back? What about the RSS readership?

The Cow Comes Home With a Bang

When the cow came back on Sunday, its RSS was down by 25% and some people were questioning whether the linkbait was worth it. However, the blog has recovered nicely and has fully regained all its traffic and RSS subscribers. So it appears that shutting down for 24 hours didn’t have much of an effect on traffic. If anything the extra buzz will help the blog to a new traffic record.

The linkbait did generate one problem however. Text Link Ads rejected the cow because the product manager though the blog was a copyright infringement on my blog. I’m sure that’ll be cleared up real soon.

If your blog goes down, don’t start pulling your hair out and worrying about all your readers going away. If your content is good, they will be back. Unless your blog is mirrored across multiple servers, down time is something that cannot be avoided. However, it’s good to know that a bit of downtime won’t kill you.