The warning has been made by a web monitoring firm which is urging webmasters to keep a close eye on their sites - especially if the indexing spiders used by search engines such as Google find too many inaccessible results due to downtime. This could be interpreted as a site that no longer exists.
 
Pingdom cites the views of Google insiders who do state that their spiders do re-crawl pages which were previously inaccessible – but it wants to encourage webmasters to be as proactive as possible in preventing downtime.
 
It suggests that webmasters can use monitoring systems to alert them if their website goes down. Regular testing and maintenance are important and teams should check response and loading times as well as using programmes such as Google Webmaster Tools to check that no pages are listed in the crawl errors section.
 
In cases where the webmaster needs to take a site down for a specific reason the right server error codes should be used instead of putting up a regular page explaining the maintenance as this might get indexed instead of the real site.
 
And on a final note, the company reminds webmasters not to fall foul of the obvious banana skins of expiring domains.