Google couldn't access your site because of a DNS error
-
Hello,
We've being doing SEO work for a company for about 8 months and it's been working really well, we've lots of top threes and first pages.
Or rather we did.
Unfortunately the web host who the client uses (who to recommended them not to) has had severe DNS problems. For the last three weeks Google has been unable to access and index the website. I was hoping this was going to be a quickly resolved and everything return to normal. However this week their listing have totally dropped, 25 page one rankings has become none, Google Webmaster tools says 'Google couldn't access your site because of a DNS error'. Even searching for their own domain no longer works!
Does anyone know how this will effect the site in the long term? Once the hosts sort it out will the rankings bounce back. Is there any sort of strategy for handling this problem? Ideally we'd move host but I'm not sure that is possible so any other options, or advice on how it will affect long term rankings so I can report to my client would be appreciated.
Many thanks
Ric
-
Hi BWRic,
Sorry for getting back to you so late, the problem seemed to be resolved but the website is having troubles again, anyway, thanks a lot for your help and advice.
Best regards,
Daniel.
-
Hi Daniel,
I'm afraid I don't know the specifics as the hosting company were very secretive and awkward. However what I do know is that their firewalls were incorrectly flagging Google as trying to perform and DDOS attack on the server. By this I presume they meant Google's spiders were being blocked. I don't know any more details than that but I hope it gives you a starting point to work from.
Regards
Ric
-
Hi BWRic,
Could you please tell me how did you resolve the issue? I am having this very same problem with a website which I have been working on, I would really appreciate your advice.
Thanks in advance
Daniel.
-
A little update for everyone. The problem has been resolved now for nearly two weeks (seems the firewall thought Google was a DDOS attack!) so I've been able to monitor the early response. It looks like the site is bouncing back well to where it previously was.
-
Adam is right, downtime like this is unacceptable and this should be the card you play to convince the client to change hosts. You have the data you need (25 page one rankings dropped) to support your argument. The costs involved with moving to the new host will be worth it. Oftentimes you can even see hosting cost savings by switching to a better host.
If you can't move, yes your rankings should come back after the site is re-indexed. The only strategy I am aware of to handle this issue is to use a host that has more redundancy built-in. It doesn't sound like the local provider is able to provided this in-house and in the future they may themselves need to use an off-site location for hosting their servers.
-
The website seems accessible to everyone but Google, if it was fully down wwe'd get them to move ASAP. We're definitely going to try and convince our client to move again now we've some ammo!
The site is actually hosted with our local telecommunications provider and it wasn't just the web hosting that was effected, nearly everyone on the island where I live had very unreliable internet connectivity for a few weeks, they're just lucky they have little to no competition.
-
3 weeks of downtime or DNS issues is an incredibly long time and is absolutely unacceptable for any webhost. I would say definitely move hosts. No matter what it takes, make it happen.
I would expect there will be little or no long term effect on the site's rankings, but I'm not 100% sure (I've never worked with a site that had severe uptime issues for more than a couple days).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
Technical SEO | | woshea0 -
How ask Google to de index scrapper sites?
While doing text Google searches for various keywords I have found two sites that have scrapped pages from my site which goes by an old URL of www.tpxcnex.com and a new URL of www.tpxonline.com www.folder.com is one of the sites and if you try to visit that site or any of the scrapped Google index listing, Chrome warns you not to. How can I ask Chrome to deindex www.folder.com or another scrapper site, or atleast deindex the URLs which have clearly scrapped my content?
Technical SEO | | DougHartline0 -
How do you 'close down' a website?
Hello all, If a company acquires a smaller company and 'absorbs' its products and services into its own website, what is the protocol with closing down the smaller company's site? So far we added our branding to the site alerting their visitors to the imminent takeover, and 301 redirected certain pages - soon we'll be redirecting all the pages to their counterparts on the main website. Once that's done, should we noindex the old site? Anything else? Thanks, Caro
Technical SEO | | Caro-O0 -
Site's IP showing WMT 'Links to My Site'
I have been going through, disavowing spam links in WMT and one of my biggest referral sources is our own IP address. Site: Covers.com
Technical SEO | | evansluke
IP: 208.68.0.72 We have recently fixed a number of 302 redirects, but the number of links actually seems to be increasing. Is this something I should ignore / disavow / fix using a redirect?0 -
Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly
Hello, We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this. The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago. At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request. Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site. We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving. Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings". However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found. If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3! We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned). We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores. The results are the same. Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time. We just could not understand why this is happening. Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months. Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice? Many thanks!
Technical SEO | | forgottenlife0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of migrating one of our retail sites over to magento. To our horror, we find out today that some pages are already being indexed by Google, and we have started receiving orders through new site. Do you have any suggestions for what may have caused this? Or similarly, what the best solution would be to de-index ourselves? We most recently excluded anything with a certain parameter from robots.txt - could this being implemented incorrectly have caused this issue? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Sitemap coming up in Google's index?
I apologize if this question's answer is glaringly obvious, but I was using Google to view all the pages it has indexed of our site--by searching for our company and then clicking the link that says to display more results for the site. On page three, it has the sitemap indexed as if it wee just another page of our site. <cite>www.stadriemblems.com/sitemap.xml</cite> Is this supposed to happen?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
How to block/notify google that your domain has been added to sites with very low trustworthiness?
Hey Guys, I am writing to SEOmoz community because a problem occurred which I do not know how to solve: My domain (xyz.com) occured on very strange sites with very low trustworthiness (even blocked by google). Checking the site, I found out that all of the pictures were ALT=xyz.com. Could this hurt my position of my site on google rankings? How to prevent such actions, what should I do? Thanks for you help in advance!
Technical SEO | | Kajmany0