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
-
Will a Robots.txt 'disallow' of a directory, keep Google from seeing 301 redirects for pages/files within the directory?
Hi- I have a client that had thousands of dynamic php pages indexed by Google that shouldn't have been. He has since blocked these php pages via robots.txt disallow. Unfortunately, many of those php pages were linked to by high quality sites mulitiple times (instead of the static urls) before he put up the php 'disallow'. If we create 301 redirects for some of these php URLs that area still showing high value backlinks and send them to the correct static URLs, will Google even see these 301 redirects and pass link value to the proper static URLs? Or will the robots.txt keep Google away and we lose all these high quality backlinks? I guess the same question applies if we use the canonical tag instead of the 301. Will the robots.txt keep Google from seeing the canonical tags on the php pages? Thanks very much, V
Technical SEO | | Voodak0 -
Google has deindexed 40% of my site because it's having problems crawling it
Hi Last week i got my fifth email saying 'Google can't access your site'. The first one i got in early November. Since then my site has gone from almost 80k pages indexed to less than 45k pages and the number is lowering even though we post daily about 100 new articles (it's a online newspaper). The site i'm talking about is http://www.gazetaexpress.com/ We have to deal with DDoS attacks most of the time, so our server guy has implemented a firewall to protect the site from these attacks. We suspect that it's the firewall that is blocking google bots to crawl and index our site. But then things get more interesting, some parts of the site are being crawled regularly and some others not at all. If the firewall was to stop google bots from crawling the site, why some parts of the site are being crawled with no problems and others aren't? In the screenshot attached to this post you will see how Google Webmasters is reporting these errors. In this link, it says that if 'Error' status happens again you should contact Google Webmaster support because something is preventing Google to fetch the site. I used the Feedback form in Google Webmasters to report this error about two months ago but haven't heard from them. Did i use the wrong form to contact them, if yes how can i reach them and tell about my problem? If you need more details feel free to ask. I will appreciate any help. Thank you in advance C43svbv.png?1
Technical SEO | | Bajram.Kurtishaj1 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Webmaster tools doesn't pick up 301 redirect
I had a few hundred URLs that died on my site. Google Webmaster Tools notified me about the increase in 404 errors. I fixed all of them by 301 redirecting them to the most relevant page and did multiple header checks to ensure that the 301 has been implemented correctly. Now a few weeks later, Google is giving me the exact same message in Google Webmaster Tools but they are all still 301 redirected. WTF?
Technical SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
We're no longer turning up in Google SERP for our brand search when we used to be #1 after our site update. Any ideas why?
We recently updated our website and during the push, someone mistakenly 301 redirected "www.brandx.com" to "brandx.com" instead of the otherway. Since then, our website no longer turns up for the search "brandx" on Google. We have reversed the mistake a few days ago, but we're still not turning up, and we used to rank #1 in Google SERP. Could it just be due to timing between the crawls and that our www. site didn't make it in Google's index due to this mistake? We have submitted our new sitemap to google a couple of days ago as well, as a side we're still showing up #1 in Bing's results however. And it should still show up based on SEOMoz's SERP report. Any help would help as I'm growing increasingly concerned.
Technical SEO | | JoeLin0 -
Why aren't certain links showing in SEOMOZ?
Hi, I have been trying to understand our page rank and domains that are linking to us. When I look at the list of linking domains, I see some bigger ones are missing and I don't know why. For example, we are in the Yahoo Directory with a link to trophycentral.com, but SEOMOZ is not showing the link. If SEOMOZ is not seeing it, my guess is Google is not either, which concerns me. There are several onther high page rank domains also not showing. Anyone have any idea why? Thanks! BTW, our domain is trophycentral.com
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Panda or Penquin -Website Fell - Shouldn't this Recover?
On March 23rd our site fell 47% in one day. www.TranslationSoftware4u.com but we still held quite a few #1 to #7 rankings on Google and thought it would just recover. Our top keyword "translation software" was #4 , now we are #19 Over the next week I waited to see if it recovered. We have been online 10+ years and always stayed with white hat. I admit to learning as I go over the years but always felt content was king so I focused on information. I really do not see my site as using spam techniques but maybe I am missing something on the way I have it. March 23rd, major drop -47% On April 2nd I started with SEO MOZ and the Research tools showed we had duplicate content warning. This was from a blog we were trying to start that only had 7 posts but it had about 20 tags per post. I did not realize that tags actually created that post under that tag. I went in and deleted the tags again being stupid and not realizing it was then making that come up 404. The blog was so small we do not get hits on it anyway so hoping it just clears itself up. ( still get duplicate warning on our directory due to using "php Link Directory", but it's due to how it reuses the title tag and description, 2 instances per category page"). Still trying to fix the php directory issue. Seems many others are running it and did not have a drop. April 24th, we dropped another -10% It keeps falling -70% now. I have gone through the site and tried to clean up any warnings like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions. With regards to links I put up a small web directory with some reciprocal linking. Our product translates languages but software is not the same as a human so we often set clients up with human translators, the directory is a nice place to help our customers find a translator or see online tools that can help. The links were not excessive, there were maybe 100 links. After the fall I went in and found some translators had gone out of business so I deleted those, I am down to 65 links now, about 45 are exchanges. I have submitted to some online directories manually, but looking back through the links there is not really anything that makes me concerned. The link back to my site was really the most neglected SEO thing I did. Again concentrating on content. I did find a few links that I was not happy about but I did not put those links so had no control. I have been working on cleaning up my title tags, and making sure the content just reads better. I have been hoping that my site would just start recovering but it keeps sliding. Has anyone seen recovery from the updates. Should I see anything yet? I cannot seem to get Google to return to the site and reindex. Am I doing somethign spammy on my site and I do not realize it? Thanks for any advice in advance!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
Is it a good idea to make 301 from a site which you know google has banned certain keywords for to a new site with similar content
Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?
Technical SEO | | Kofoed0
