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
-
My wepgages aren't crawled by google
Most of my webpages aren't crawled by google.
Technical SEO | | Poutokas
Why is that and what can i do to make google index at least most of my webpages?0 -
WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
Hello Moz Community. I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure. If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks. jZVh7zt.png
Technical SEO | | revimedia1 -
Where did the 'Contributor To' area go in Google+
I went into my Google+ profile this morning to try to add a new guest blog in the 'Contributor To' section but I can't find it. Did they move it somewhere?
Technical SEO | | JonathanGoodman0 -
Want to Target Mobile site for Google Mobile Version and Desktop Site for Google Desktop Version
I have ecommerce site with both mobile version and desktop version. Mobile version starts with m.example.com and full version starts with www.example.com I am using same content through out both site and using 301 redirection by detecting user agent vice-versa. My both sites are accessible to crawl by any google spider. I have submitted both sites's sitemap to GWT and mobile site having mobile sitemap xml, so google can easily recognize my mobile site. Is it going to help to rank my both sites as per my expectation? I need to rank for mobile site in Google mobile and ranking for desktop site in Google desktop version. Some of pages of my mobile site are started to appearing in Google desktop version. So how I can stop them to appear in Google desktop? Your comments are highly welcome.
Technical SEO | | Hexpress0 -
When is the last time Google crawled my site
How do I tell the last time Google crawled my site. I found out it is not the "Cache" which I had thought it was.
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
Google +1 Button on Flash sites
One of my customers is willing to add Google +1 button on their Flash websites. Is it possible? How can we add Google +1 button on a Flash site? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | merkal20050 -
404 errors on a 301'd page
I current have a site that when run though a site map tool (screaming frog or xenu) returns a 404 error on a number of pages The pages are indexed in Google and when visited they do 301 to the correct page? why would the sitemap tool be giving me a different result? is it not reading the page correctly?
Technical SEO | | EAOM0 -
Issue with 'Crawl Errors' in Webmaster Tools
Have an issue with a large number of 'Not Found' webpages being listed in Webmaster Tools. In the 'Detected' column, the dates are recent (May 1st - 15th). However, looking clicking into the 'Linked From' column, all of the link sources are old, many from 2009-10. Furthermore, I have checked a large number of the source pages to double check that the links don't still exist, and they don't as I expected. Firstly, I am concerned that Google thinks there is a vast number of broken links on this site when in fact there is not. Secondly, why if the errors do not actually exist (and never actually have) do they remain listed in Webmaster Tools, which claims they were found again this month?! Thirdly, what's the best and quickest way of getting rid of these errors? Google advises that using the 'URL Removal Tool' will only remove the pages from the Google index, NOT from the crawl errors. The info is that if they keep getting 404 returns, it will automatically get removed. Well I don't know how many times they need to get that 404 in order to get rid of a URL and link that haven't existed for 18-24 months?!! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0