The Internet has changed way we access information, and way we buy and sell products and services. When it works, which, fortunately, is most of time, ideas and cash flow from person to person, company to company, and country to country.

But when inevitable happens and your pages go down, your business, your bank account and your reputation can suffer, especially if you are unaware of down status of your e-business operations for more than a few minutes. One way this can hurt you is with search engines.

Whether you operate a corporate website, a mom-and-pop or something in between, there’s no question about it. If you want to get traffic via search engines, you have to work at getting and maintaining placement on first page of current “big four” — Google, Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves. Depending on keywords you’re trying to get high results for, this can be a time-and-resource intensive process.

Everyone who uses search engine marketing knows that getting and keeping high placement is an ongoing process filled with many unknowns. The rules of game seem to change without notice, causing frustration, disappointment and even desperation among beginners and veterans alike. Methods that work today may not work tomorrow. Tactics that may be “legal” today may cause problems tomorrow.

It’s as if, despite all research, experimentation and best intentions, there really is no exact formula that can be applied to guarantee results. There is, however, one aspect of search engine marketing that is a known quantity. If your pages are down — even briefly — when spiders visit, you run risk of losing your place. And unless they come back up immediately, they may be dropped altogether.

For example, Google’s “Information for Webmasters” area says that if your pages cannot be crawled after several attempts due to network or hosting problems, they won’t be listed — meaning they’ll be dropped — and it may take “a few weeks” to for them to show up again. MSN’s guidelines state that if your server is offline or there is another access problem when their spider tries to crawl your site, it may not return “until a later time.” Neither Yahoo nor AskJeeves seems to have guidelines on this issue, but it’s reasonable to assume that they and other search engine spiders operate like Google and MSN.

When you look at Site Statistics for your web site, what do you see? Do you see only a Hit and Pages Viewed count? Or, do you see Incoming Linkage, Visiting Robots, and all other goodies Stats Reports reveal?

Myself, I could give a rats behind what my ranking is on certain Search Engines, as long as I see that they consistently are spidering my sites. Sooner or later world is going to revolt against search engines dictating how web sites are constructed, and realize expense created by trying to satisfy search engines is more than most small, medium, and some large business care to continue to pay. Face it, paying for SEO, Adwords, Optimize this and Optimize that while keeping many of us gainfully employed, is also quite expensive.