Site Crash Effect On Traffic
-
All,
I manage a site that unfortunately crashed due to a server issue in late October for about 3 hours.
Prior to the crash, traffic was the best it had ever been in the 3+ year history of the site. As you might expect, since the crash traffic has gone gradually down and is now about 15% off pre-crash numbers.
I understand that when a site crashes, it disrupts the crawling process and can disrupt traffic (in my case rich snippets were thrown off for days) but would love to hear experiences any of you have had in similar situations.
How much did traffic drop after a crash? When did it recover? Other thoughts?
Thanks,
John
-
Well in some cases I have received messages from Google Webmaster notifications "Increase in Server Errors" where server didn't respond.
It is likely that server had an internal error or was busy when attempting to process these requests. Google recommends following in this case:
Recommended action
- Check the Crawl Errors page in Webmaster Tools.
- Check your scripts and script permissions.
- Examine the log files on the server for your site for scripts or pages that might be crashing.
- Consider addressing the load on your server.
Though personally in my case there was not much drop in traffic and rankings in Google remained consistent too..though will be interesting to see what other say.
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
-
GA4 account & property not showing in traffic property setup list.
Hi there, I've connected multiple client accounts to GA4 already, but three of our accounts that we have administrator rights to in GA4 are not showing up in our selectable accounts/properties list when logged in via Moz to add to the traffic settings area. Anyone else have this issue and find a fix?
Reporting & Analytics | | luminusagency0 -
Drop in indexation but increase in organic traffic
We've had a puzzling drop in indexed pages on our ecommerce website. My crawl returns just over 25k items. Until 19/6 we had about 23-24k indexed. Then we experienced a sudden drop from 19/6 to 26/6: from 23,400 to 18,999, losing 4.4k pages from one week to the next. At the same time, our organic traffic has not decreased, it actually increased, however, it's only been a couple of weeks so that may be coincidence. A few things that have happened during the past few weeks: 31/5: we implemented pagination on category pages to avoid issues with duplicate content - could it be that this led to a decrease in indexed pages 3 weeks later? However, I can only find about 1.5k pages in my crawl that are page 2+ 18-19/6: we had some website outages over the weekend; as a B2B business, we don't get much traffic over the weekend, so I can't see an impact to traffic. However, the following week, indexation dropped by another 250 (then stayed the same this past week), so I don't think this was a factor. 21/6: we retired another website and migrated it to our main website. However, all pages were redirected to existing pages so no new pages were created for the migration. This doesn't really explain a decrease in indexation, but may account for some of the increase in organic traffic; however not all as the retired website hardly got any organic traffic. So, should we be worried? As our website is quite large, it would probably be quite difficult to pin point exactly which pages dropped off the index, but a loss of 19% of pages is quite significant. Then again, it doesn't appear to have negatively impacted organic traffic... Have you got any suggestions for what I should be looking at to find out what happened? Should I be worried at this point? I will definitely continue to have an eye on how our organic traffic (and indexation) develops but I am not sure if there is anything I can do at this point. I'd appreciate your advice on this, to make sure I am not missing something blindingly obvious. Thanks! RmWaNib JJm4tC3
Reporting & Analytics | | ViviCa10 -
Direct Traffic from Ashburn, VA
We've seen a huge spike in traffic form Ashburn, VA every Monday. It's wrecking our analytics. I don't want to create a filter based on location because we should receive legitimate traffic from that location. I see there are a few other identifiers that make me think I could add a filter for just those items (iOS 5, Safari). Does anyone have a current best-practice for this type of problem? Tx!
Reporting & Analytics | | fishlizzer2 -
Why am i still seeing very recent organic kw traffic being reported in Analytics if G is now fully encrypted ?
Why am i still seeing very recent organic kw traffic being reported in Analytics if G is now fully encrypted ? Should it not all be 'Not Provided' now ? When this fully roles out if not already wont it be impossible to distinguish between brand and non brand kw ? Cheers Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
What is click2.scour, and why is it showing up as Referral Traffic in Google Analytics?
I've noticed that a couple of my clients in the insurance industry have been receiving a pretty large boost in Referral Traffic from a source called click2.scour.com and click2.efacts.com. What surprises me most is that the traffic has a low Bounce Rate, a high Avg. Visit Duration, and is made up of 100% New Visits. What is this? Why would they be getting so much traffic from these two sources all of a sudden? Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | copyjack0 -
Google Analytics - Referral Traffic Question
How Google Analytics determine that some particular web site referred traffic if there is no back link on that site?
Reporting & Analytics | | DiamondJewelryEmpire1 -
Yahoo Site explorer: Different results for www & non-www domain. Can we merge these?
When checking our domain on yahoo site explorer, different results are shown for www.theprintspace.de and theprintspace.de. We have done a 301 redirect, as we want to optimise our www.theprintspace.de domain. However, we have a lot more backlinks for theprintspace.de. Is there any way of merging the two, so we don't loose all the linkjuice we get for theprintspace.de and use those links to optimise www.theprintspace.de? Thanks for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Waplington0 -
Traffic dropped 75% - Panda 2 Penalized?
Hello everyone, My e-commerce website traffic dropped by 75% overnight, on April 12th. The website has been around since 2003 and growing every year. Over the years gained some great placement for some competitive keywords and stayed on page 1 for some time. After the Panda update, some of our major keywords dropped from page 1 to page 10. The first Panda update had a slightly negative effect on us, by bumping up all the brand's websites (brands we carry) placing the brands in the first couple positions (giving them 2-3 first spots) pushing us down. However, the Panda 2 killed us. I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on my situation. Did anyone ever have luck or would recommend contacting Google, and asking them for advise or reasons why the site was dropped. The website in question is www.instyleswimwear.com Thanks in advance,
Reporting & Analytics | | AlexGop
Alex0