Database Crash affecting our rankings
-
Here is one for you. We had a database crash, and was down for an hour and 15 minutes, on Dec 18th. During this time our system automatically sent out a 301 redirect to our product home page. (iboats.com/boat-parts-accessories/dm/)
On Dec 24th I noticed a huge ranking drop on a lot of our keywords, and some keywords that were serving up the redirect page from our database crash, in place of its normally ranked page.
So my assumption is that Google was crawling our site during the database crash and caching the redirect pages in place of our regularly ranked pages. So when a search query is made that would normally display our ranked page, it is now displaying the redirect page from the crawled cache.
And on other keywords where we normally would rank for, Google no longer has that page cached, so it drops it from ranking.
My question: Does this assumption sound accurate? If so, I'm assuming over time that our past ranked pages will show up once again after Google recrawls those pages and saves them in their cache.
I have several sites that were affected with this:
Thanks in advance for your input
-
Glad to hear you appear to be back on the right track
-
Update:
After unblocking Google, almost all of our rankings are back up, and in some cases a little improved. I was surprised how quickly Google recrawled and ranked the pages that dropped.
I did do a Fetch and submit on all my websites and pages. I'm not sure how Fetches are attended to by Google, but it appears they are.
I have an IT guy who doesn't feel a Fetch makes any difference. He says Google will crawl when they want to and probably does not pay attention to the Fetch request.
-
I wanted to get back to report the cause of our problem with a lot of our rankings dropping. We originally thought it was due to a database crash. And that still could be affecting some things.
We moved our servers to a new location. A couple of weeks ago, we switched over to some new IP addresses. When we did so, a program started blocking Google's IP addresses because they were hitting our servers with a lot of hits, and put those IP addresses on a blocked list. So our pages on some of the websites stopped getting crawled, and thus rankings dropped. We discovered the problem when exploring our Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats and noticed that the "kilobytes downloaded per day" had flat-lined. Doing a fetch on selected pages we could see that it was not fetching the page. So after unblocking those IP addresses, the pages got crawled, our crawl stats went back up, and our rankings started going back to where they were. We still have some rankings that have not bounced back, but assume they will as new crawls re-index those pages.
A lesson learned for me was to pay attention to the crawl stats. Any drastic variations could be a sign of a problem.
Brad
iboats.com -
I'm pretty sure that GWT is a little vague in terms of times that Googlebot visited with just the crawlrate shown on a day by day basis and there's some lag between now and when it happened. CPanel will show when spiders visited in latest visitors from memory, however I think that rather than looking back it would be better to simply ensure that this doesn't happen again with the 302 rather than the 301. Maybe refreshing of your sitemap submissions in GWT would help to get some crawling going on with a ping or two to get Googlebot back soon.
-
Also, can't we use GWT to find out the exact times or at least approximate times of when Google crawled a site? Or can we not find that information so precisely? In this case, it does seem that the 301 vs. 302 is the key problem, but also the fact that the system for getting rid of the 301 didn't work out properly.
-
It seems extreme that Google would react within an hour and 15 mins but who knows nowadays. Keep an eye on your GWT account and hopefully if you have a decent crawl rate things should remedy themselves. Stephen Salstrand made a good point. 302's rather than 301's should help. It's great to have something in place like a redirection for user experience in case of database failure, however, as Stephen said, it should be made clear to Google that it's only temporary.
-
Investigating it further, we have some permanent redirects that are still hanging. I've got my IT guys working on it as we speaking.
I've got to run, but I would like to revisit this soon. Once we have determined the problem, I will post it here.
Thanks for your opinions. They have helped.
-
Your assumptions are globally right. However, I have never seen Google react that quickly to a 301 redirect or even a crash, I always tell my customers "if you have a temporary issue with 404 and 500 erros, don't worry about it too much, Google won't react unless it is a permanent issue that lasts over three or four crawls".
This is why I would also investigate a penalty that just happened to take effect shortly after the crash. To rule that out, could you please tell us if some of your major keywords are still ranking well?
I don't think you sould worry too much about that, just wait a few days and see if some pages recover.
-
Good point on the 301's. I'll look into that.
Thanks, for your input!
-
I think your assumptions are on par. However, make sure to review that the 301 has been removed. Also, if you still want that auto redirect to happen on a crash, make it a 302 and not a 301 as a 301 will suck a lot of life out of your site (since SEs see it as permanent).
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
-
Added Schema and Rankings Went Down
Hello - We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?
Technical SEO | | Erin_IAN0 -
Internal Link Rank Flow
I've read in many articles that pages can "pass" rank to other pages internally. Is anyone aware of any well done internal linking case studies which confirm this? If my homepage has the strongest Page Authority, would linking to another page deeper into my website from my homepage boost my rank for the deeper page in Google (more so than linking to the deep page from a page with lower page authority)?
Technical SEO | | poke10 -
IT's Hurt My Rank?HELP!!!
hi,guys,john here, i just began use the MOZ service several days ago, recently i noticed one thing that one keyword on the first google search result page, but when i done some external links,the rank down from 1 to 8, i think may be the bad quality external links caused the rank down. so my question,should i delete the bad quality links or build more better quality links? which is better for me. easy to delete the bad links and hard to build high quality links. so what's your better opinion,guys? thanks John
Technical SEO | | smokstore0 -
Then why my site is not ranking
My website's DA and PAs are good compare with my competitors. Then why my site is not ranking.
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
New keyword simply not Ranking
Evening all, first post. I'm currently ranking OK for a broad range of keywords - nothing at number 1 but some are on the first page. However, there is one particular keyword which simply refuses to get indexed. I've witnessed this behaviour before with another site where it appears at SERP 300 or so, then vanishes, comes back at 200 odd and then vanishes. Right now, it's not even ranking in any position. I'm using SERPFox for SERP position on Google. I've had Moz analyse the content on page and it's getting an A. The article is about 2000 words, with good Title and page description and the keyword is appearing under 1%. My question is, have you witnessed odd behaviour like this before where other keywords are ranking OK but an odd few don't even get indexed? I have a few links built to the URL and asked Google Webmaster tools to index the URL but still nothing. I have no penalties or anything to worry about. The only other info I have is that this URL is on a brand-new domain but the previous domain has a 301 redirect with a page authority of 42 and a domain authority of 38 (not too high). And, everything else appears to be running along OK. The point is, I have no expectations about the keyword ranking in a certain position but find it odd how the keyword keeps popping in and out of Google SERP. The keyword has a difficulty of: 58% Any thoughts appreciated. Robert. uH7vtbh
Technical SEO | | hooneyrobert0 -
Huge ranking difference between google and bing
I am trying to rank for the keyword "trash bags" I did a lot of on-page optimization and link building. We started ranking #2 on bing and yahoo but google seems to be stubbornly fluctuating between being as high as 20 and as low as 45 and even dropped our rankings for a couple of weeks. Is there any need for concern if google is acting so different from bing/yahoo?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Should i include this group of text to improve ranking
Hi i am worried about my site www.in2town.co.uk because it it a magazine site i am finding it hard to find space to put text to describe the site for the search engines. I have put text near the top of the site which is under the logo and then i have put more text under the first set of headline where i have put a twitter sign and text but it does not look that great. I rank five in google for the word lifestyle magazine and feel i could do much better and i need to rank for other words but because my site is a magazine site, i am struggling. can anyone offer me advice and let me know if the text looks rubbish please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does IP Changes Affect SEO Metrics?
Okay, So yesterday I asked a question about setting up custom error pages in IIS 6.0 to properly do a 24 hour 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable. With no answer, (not to the despair of the community as the question has NO simple or easy answer 🙂 So after a night of dreaming about solutions 🙂 I realized that we have the ability to just clone the site.... So basically it would just become a redundant server or mirror site for 24 hours. With all that being said the question is..... What SEO pitfalls might I encounter from this if any I suspect none as load balancing and redundancy is a fact of life in the WEB world, especially since it will be a MAX of 24 hours downtime for maint.
Technical SEO | | Jinx146780