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
-
Can Segment capture organic traffic? If so is it more reliable than Google Analytics?
Hi mozzers, We just learned that our standard GA hasn't been as reliable as we hoped so and we are trying to find other ways to track organic sessions. Which solution would you consider? Is Segment one of them? If so, is it more reliable than Google Analytics? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ty19861 -
Direct / (none) Spam Traffic Help
In July 2015, we experienced an over 1,000% increase in traffic and it has remained like that ever since. It's all spam traffic and I have no clue how to get rid of it. I added in your typical .htaccess blocks from known culprits with little to no effect. Read up on Ghost traffic and applied filters to no effect. The spam is completely distributed as far as I can tell both geographically as well as by network providers. Where once we had pretty decent bounce rates of around 50%, now, since all my Analytics data is meaningless - it's around 90%. I could apply a filter but beyond my GA account providing no insights, I'm also concerned about the increased use of server resources. I'd ideally like to stop the traffic completely. The only distinguishing feature of the traffic that I have been able to determine is browser size. Comparing June 2015 to July 2015 we saw the following: Browser size visits: 620 x 460 = 6,828 vs 0, 610 x 450 = 175 vs 0, 1330 x 630 = 71 vs 1, 1890 x 940 = 67 vs 0, 780 x 580 = 58 v 5. Other than that, I can find no unifying theme to the traffic beyond being traffic hitting our homepage and having no medium. Nothing special that I am aware of happened in July. We didn't do any sort of...really anything. We did have our network compromised by ransomware in the beginning of June, which we promptly ignored and restored backups - at no point did we try to contact the criminals, but I am doubtful there is any connection considering that our website is remotely hosted. If anyone has any suggestions or has seen anything like this before, please let me know. spam-traffic.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Nivik230 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
Google Analytics unexplainable traffic spike
Viewing this report **Behaviour > Site content > All pages **with primary dimensions of **Page ** and **Page title **are showing different results for one specific page on our site. We noticed a huge spike in pageviews and entrances to that specific page on our site. The user flow report shows traffic going through and from the page (in high volume) from other pages on the site which suggests that it's not the usual case of spam referrals. When I view the report above by page, I get unrealistic data. Over 600% increase in pageviews and over 900% increase in entrances. When I view by page title however, I get realistic results. Can anyone help shed some light on why these two reports will be different? Anyone else seeing similar issues?
Reporting & Analytics | | OptiBacUK0 -
Organic Traffic Spike
I've been chipping away at the SEO for a client's site for about 6 weeks and a few days ago noticed a huge spike in organic traffic for about a dozen keywords. See attached. Previously traffic was around 20-30 unique new visitors a day. On the 17 it went up to 500+ for 1 day, now it's come back down again. This spike was not for 1 keyword but for about a dozen. I've never seen this before and wondered if anyone had experienced similar. The site is about 3 months old. ebix3rl
Reporting & Analytics | | deployseo0 -
Measuring events to external sites
Im having problem measuring click on ads by using events in GA or Jetpack. For example when I checked out yesterday this is what I read: 1. In GA events it says 12 clicks 2. In Jetpack it says 9 clicks But when I look at Referrals to the actual site directly it says 18 clicks Which one is the rights one? I need this because I use this to invoice clients end of month! and it cant be any "maybe".something. cheers, R
Reporting & Analytics | | rrrobertsson0 -
Should we add the city to our keywords for a site that is only local?
This is one of those things I have done for a long time and all of a sudden asked myself was it necessary: For our local clients, we add the city name (Houston, KC, Birmingham) after each keyword. An example would be TestSite.com/big-tester-houston A Title Tag might be Big Tester Houston | Test Site, etc. Where appropriate we do the same with H1 or H2's and occasionally in the content we will use the city name. The thought being that since the site is only for a given city, it will be deemed more relevant than a site from outside.( I understand there are other factors in SEO; this is a specific question around adding the city). Yes, we also optimize with local directories/citation sites. Is this overkill, is it even worthwhile? Is there any evidence one way or another? I would love some strong opinions backed up with something other than anecdotal evidence where possible.
Reporting & Analytics | | RobertFisher0 -
Email campaigns. Should I link to my blog or to my site?
I have a client for who we write and post a daily blog article. The articles are optimized and linked to particular targeted content on his top level site. Now we are going to start e-marketing to his 3000+ website users to announce inventory changes and specials. My question is (from a SE standpoint) are we better off linking the e-mail content to the blog and introducing people to the blog (but adding an additional step for getting to the new inventory. Or are we better off putting a link in the HTML E-mail letter that we send out to both the blog and separately to the inventory section? Just to clarify, we wonder if the search engines would provide some additional authority for the extra blog traffic and thereby build the overall score of the blog & site. We are looking at the e-mail campaigns as a potential opportunity to impact SE scores not just awareness of new inventory. Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | webindustry0