I have a webstore and recently went on holiday so just placed all of the products out of stock and left the website open. In this time my traffic, which is almost entirely from google, dropped from 5k per month to about 1k. I've done the same thing before and it didn't suffer as badly, but those times I had a popup as soon as the page loaded saying "be right back" so I'm wondering if not having the message up would have affected the google rankings more? It was closed for about 6 weeks, this is the longest period I have ever left it closed. Thinking about it now I should have just paid someone to send the stock out for me. Rookie error.
Also, how is it that google can know your site is less "useful" to the customer when it is closed like that, I guess they track if they come back and click on another link in the search results after visiting?
Anyway, how long do you guys think it will take to recover, the traffic has been exponentially growing for about 2 years and I feel like I've just lost a year's progress? Definitely won't be closing the site ever again. Thanks so much for any insight offered.