SeoMoz Crawler Shuts Down The Website Completely
-
Recently I have switched servers and was very happy about the outcome. However, every friday my site shuts down (not very cool if you are getting 700 unique visitors per day). Naturally I was very worried and digged deep to see what is causing it. Unfortunately, the direct answer was that is was coming from "rogerbot". (see sample below)
Today (aug 5) Same thing happened but this time it was off for about 7 hours which did a lot of damage in terms of seo. I am inclined to shut down the seomoz service if I can't resolve this immediately.
I guess my question is would there be a possibility to make sure this doesn't happen or time out like that because of roger bot. Please let me know if anyone has answer for this. I use your service a lot and I really need it.
Here is what caused it from these error lines:
216.244.72.12 - - [29/Jul/2011:09:10:39 -0700] "GET /pregnancy/14-weeks-pregnant/ HTTP/1.1" 200 354 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)"
216.244.72.11 - - [29/Jul/2011:09:10:37 -0700] "GET /pregnancy/17-weeks-pregnant/ HTTP/1.1" 200 51582 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)"
-
After much research and implementing ton of added scripts on my apache server to track it - the bots did effect the shutdown. However, for this not to happen to you or if you ever have a problem of that nature this is how I resolved it.
It is an excellent article about how to implement the script to restart immediately once all available threads for apache are exhausted and your apache crashes. The script basically check apache server status every 5 min and in an event that it crashed - it will automatically restart it and send you an email notification. I say pretty good deal for risking to be offline only 5 min if anything major happens. Just as well I am also running a cron job every morning at 1am to restart apache. Please note that you need to have knowledge of SSH commands and manipulations in order for this to happen. And OMG I am talking like a geek... All the best to you...
-
Wow Randy, what a story man. Actually the funny part is one of the jobs I do is monitor for things like that - but I would not go that far to actually shut someone's site down - precisely for the reason of knowing what that could do. It is great thing to know that for 5 days you still preserved your ranking. That makes me feel so much better. I am keeping the rule of 1 dedicated server per 2 domains (both related). In this whole case we are talking about a domain called babylifetime.com. I am about to embark on a journey of custom development for site similar to squarespace.com but with much more addons - so I need this thing to work properly. I think I got this SEO in organic arena pretty well, but again things like the issue in this thread are what is keeping me on my toes.
-
Googlebot would have to be indexing your site at the very moment that it was down for anything to happen and even if it's down for a half a day, from my experience, rankings are unaffected.
However, there's a small side-effect. If visitors that are coming from X, Y or Z engine, visit your site and there is a 404 or Server Error and they click the back button or get the "Google Can't Find This" page, it can, for that period of time increase your bounce rate. If the originating click starts at say Google and then the clicker goes back to google, it tells google that the page wasn't what they were looking for in relation to the term that they used, or that it didn't load, or that there is a problem with it. Basically any reason that can be tied to bounce rate.
As alarming as that may sound, I don't believe that it would effect your rankings.
The easiest way to see if Google noticed is to log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account and check for errors. If they list any errors such as 404 or "server unavailable" (which I'm not sure they have that one) for any pages that you know are usually live and well, then you'll know they noticed.
But again, I'm not under the belief that it will largely effect your rankings. I've read from Google's words that they do go back to sites that were unavailable or down and try to continue their index.
As for your server being down for 12 hours. That's a lengthy amount of time. I can't even imagine it. You might want to check your hosting capabilities. You should be back up and running in minutes, not hours.
Just to give you a some piece of mind. I have a plethora of affiliate sites that make a small income for me. I once registered a domain name that a very large corporation didn't appreciate. It had a trademarked word in the domain. Long story short, my domain info was set to private so they got legally got the server shut down. I didn't know for days because everything was on auto-pilot and I wasn't checking my related email addresses. When that server was shut down, 100+ websites on that server went down too because that one trademarked (partially) domain was on the same server and same hosting package. The sites were down for about 5 or 6 days while I sorted through the legal paperwork. After I made an agreement to give the big company the domain, minus the 20K in damages that they originally wanted, the hosting company turned the server and hosting package back on.
Not a single one of the domains lost ranking. Not even 1 spot! Today, they still rank in the top 2 to 3 of their biggest terms. So my words are truly from experience and are from a worst-case scenario. I think you'll be fine.
Finally, to clear the air. I didn't do anything bad, nor would I ever do anything bad with a domain name (other than keep it in my portfolio). The big company was upset that I got the domain before they did. All I had on the index page was their description of their product that was named in the domain. That was enough to be taken down for copyright and trademark infringement.
In the end, that company was actually very cool about it. And it's a Fortune 10 company! I was surprised!
-
EGOL thanks for your reply.
A) Also my latest though is that unusual activity is blocking it. But then again, it is dedicated server and should be capable of handling it separately. We are talking about SeoMoz bot and highest dedicated GoDaddy server. Without anything specifically installed to interfere with apache server.
B) RAM, bandwidth, space, PHP memory and other memory limits etc. is all under 20% of actual use.
-
I am willing to bet that the root issue is with the host and one of these situations is occurring: A) the host is throttling your processor resources and shutting your domain down after unusual activity occurs on your site.... B) total activity on the server (your site and other sites) exceed a certain level and the server limits resource available for processing.
I would be looking for a new host.
-
Randy thanks for the response. There is definitely something going on related directly to rogerbot on the server. I have different crawlers running at all times and nothing ever happens. This particular problem ties in when seomoz bots start doing their job (fridays) and is backtracked to specific bot.As for delay. I tried different ones up to 20 - but same problem persists.
At the moment I have tech team reviewing apache server to see specifics of this. I will also post it here for other to see when I find out.
But it is weird and now I don't know when the site will shut down. Driving me crazy man!
As additional question to this thread: When your site goes down for lets say 12 hours and you have many organic google high ranked listings. Does that have huge impact or what is acceptable?
-
Jury,
I'm not sure if rogerBot is doing anything to you site but I do know a way to slow rogerBot and any other robot / crawler which takes directions from the robots.txt file that should be on your site.
Basically, just add the two lines of code that are represented below to your robots.txt file. With this addition, you are telling the useragent (rogerBot) to take 10 seconds between pages. You can change that number to anything you want. The more seconds you add, the slower it goes. And this of course is if rogerBot takes directions. I'm fairly sure it does!
NON-AGENT SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
User-Agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 10
EXAMPLE FOR ROGERBOT
User-Agent: rogerBot
Crawl-Delay: 10
Good Luck,
Randy -
Thanks Lewis...I will do that and see if they have any suggestions...!
-
Hi Jury
If you haven't already i would recommend raising the issue through the help email address help@seomoz.org
On the Q&A forum we can pass thoughts or suggestions but the support team at seomoz will be best placed to answer this.
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
-
Two Different IP address pointing to my website, does it will effect my website from SEO point of view
Due to some reason my website https://xyz.com is not redirecting to my main website domain - https://www.xyz.com so our tech team suggested - we will have the non-www name on a different IP and we'll 301 redirect that to the https://www.xyz.com. if it works does it will effect our website from SEO point of view? please let me know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BPLLC0 -
Installing SSL to website and site ranking
I am installing SSL to my website. Will it hurt my ranking in Google as the url will change and backlinks of the website are without ssl url.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Esnipper0 -
Problem with Google finding our website
We have an issue with Google finding our website: (URL removed) When we google "(keyword removed)" in google.com.au, our website doesn't come up anywhere. This is despite inserting the suitable title tag and onsite copy for SEO. We found this strange, and thought we'd investigate further. We decided to just google the website URL in google.com.au, to see if it was being properly found. Our site appeared at the top but with this description: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We also can see that the incorrect title tag is appearing. From this, we assumed that there must be an issue with the robot.txt file. We decided to put a new robot.txt file up: (URL removed) This hasn't solved the problem though and we still have the same issue. If someone could get to the bottom of this for us, we would be most appreciative. We are thinking that there may possibly be another robot.txt file that we can't find that is causing issues, or something else we're not sure of! We want to get to the bottom of it so that the site can be appropriately found. Any help here would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative0 -
Adding a Directory to Successful Article Website
We are considering adding roughly 1,300 pages to a 2,300 page website within the drug rehab niche. Our website is generating roughly 10,000 uniques from Search / month. **Is there a way to estimate the change in traffic to the existing content on the site when we add 30-40% pages in the form of a directory? ** **Is there a way to estimate the effect of the existing traffic and links to our newly added part of the site (the directory)? **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alltreatment0 -
External links from banned websites
Currently working with a client that has seen his rankings diminish after the penguin update. I've manually analyzed all his 600 backlinks and identified approximately 85 external links from websites that have been banned by Google. How do these sites affect his current rankings? Should i just disavow all these links using the Google disavow tool? Any comments would be highly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Johansson0 -
URL strategy mobile website
Hello everyone, We are facing a challenging decision about where our website (Flash Gaming website) is going. We are in the process of creating html5 games in the same theme of the flash games that we provide to our users. Now our main concern is to decide how to show this new content to the user? Shall we create brand new set of urls such as : http://www.mydomain.com/games/mobile/kids/ Or shall we adapt the main desktop url : http://www.mydomain.com/games/kids/ and show the users two different versions of the page depending on whether they are using a mobile device (so they see a mobile version) or a pc/laptop (so they a see desktop version). Or even redirect people to a sub-domain : http://m.mydomain.com/ The main idea we had is to keep the same url structure, as it seems that google is giving the same search results if you are using a mobile device or not. And creating a new set of urls or even a sub-domain, may involve a lot of work to get those new links to the same PA as the desktop URL that is here and know since a while now. Also the desktop page game should not be accessible to the mobile devices, so should this be redirected (301?) to the mobile homepage of the site? But how google will look at the fact that one url is giving 2 different contents, CSS etc, and also all those redirects might look strange... we are worried that doing so will hurt the page authority and its ranking ... but we are trying to find the best way to combine SEO and user experience. Any input on this will be really appreciated. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drimlike0 -
Newbie to SEO and SEOMOZ help
Hey everyone i just came across SEOMOZ today, i have been building websites for 3 years now but SEO is something which has always been a scary topic to consider trying to master. I have made a decision to do this in 2012 and i have been looking for a software package which can stear me and teach me. I have been reading the site help today and i feel totally swamped! i have created my campaign but a lot of the results dont make much sense to me and i am unsure of how to fix the errors they found. For instance the crawl diagnostics shows i have 5 4xx client errors. They show me a link to the page where the error is http://www.mydomain.com/category/latest-news/function.require but when i go to see what this is i just find an error 404 not found page.How do i go about removing this error if i have no idea where the problem is? I have started reading SEO User guide and beginers guide and i know it is going to take me a long time to get use to this all, but i am struggling to find the starting point and hope someone can possible help me find the first few steps. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | buntrosgali0