Penalties for site going down often?
-
I have a client with a site that ranks for some very competitive terms who consistently has server issues and the site goes down for a day at a time. Each time this happens his site seems to drop in site wide rankings and then stay there for months without ever fully recovering. Only part of the rankings are usually recovered.
Has anyone else seen this trend? Is it something Google keeps on record without fully removing any penalty addressed?
-
Does the server return a 503 not available when it goes down at least? Or is it somehow set to show a 404? You want to make sure it's showing a 503 to the bots so they know the server is down and not that the pages have been removed.
-
Yep, I dont think its a penalty as such, its just what happens when you disappear from the rankings - maybe they wait for re spidreing of the whole site to return traffic. I have worked with 2 large sites that have this happen a few times and recovery takes a few weeks to get back to pre-downtime levels (where downtime is significant 1- 3 days)
-
I believe that Google do take this into account, though the effect you describe here is quite marked. Google will rightly see your client's site as providing a poor customer journey is letting them down by being down when they have suggested it as a good source for keyword destination. Therefore they will penalise. Can they not solve server issues?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New site failing to rank - could this be why?
I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following... The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other. This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
WhoIs penalty
Does anyone know if it's possible to get a penalty on WHOIS data and a shared IP address? We had some bad SEO done (And at ranking demolished) on one of our company websites which has the same WHOIS data and is on the same IP address as another side which is just seems to have taken a knock. Is it possible Google could have associated both and penalised accordingly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
AngularJS - How does Google go?
We're rebuilding our entire website in angularJS. We've got it rendering fine in WMT, but does that mean that it's content is detectable? I've looked into prerender.io and that seems like a great solution to the problem of not seeing any static HTML, but is it really necessary? I'm looking into this as I'm having the argument currently with my devs, and they're all certain that Google renders angularJS fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | localdirectories0 -
Implications from portfolio site
I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding links coming into main site from another site in the client portfolio. The main site we are working on has been going great, organic traffic has grown considerably. The past few weeks there has been a subtle decline including ranking for a few keywords down a little. What I have noticed is that there is another site in the portfolio (that I am not working on) has had a steady tailspin in organic traffic since Jan and i've been informed it is a dying site in terms of the products offered. This has some links in the main menu going directly to the main site. My gut feeling is to isolate the secondary site from the main (no-follow or remove links), but the impact on slightly dropped rankings on the main site is not directly related to those linked pages. Would you go for it and isolate anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Site speed tests
In webmaster tools my site is showing that it is taking longer and longer to load, and it has now doubled. Is there a way to check which pages are the problem? The site is quite large so I can't check them one at a time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How important are social bookmarking sites
How important are links from social bookmarking sites from an SEO perspective?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340