My Site Went Down for 2 Days and Traffic Crashed 50%. Is It Temporary?

[Jared]

I had a site that went down for around 24-36 hours earlier in the week (a clumsy .htaccess issue gave all inner pages an error). For the past three days, the traffic's been down around 40-50% (from around 2,000 a day, to around 1,000).

Two questions:

1. Is this something that's going to last, or is it just a temporary setback?
2. What's the best way to handle the situation (outside of fixing the error, obviously)?

Thanks.

 

[Ryuzaki]

It's temporary, but Google has to recrawl to see the site isn't throwing errors. Best thing to do is head to the old Search Console and request a crawl of the homepage and all internal links from there, so they crawl out the whole site. Also, make sure you have a sitemap submitted while you're there. It's the best way to feed them a list of new and old posts and keep them crawled regularly.