Can unreliable server hurt your serps?
-
Hi
I have a small personal blog about food and wine that I recently moved from blogger to wordpress and it is currently being hosted by the company who moved the blog over from one system to the other.
This week I've noticed an 80% drop in organic traffic thanks to losing pretty much every first page SERP, there's no messages in WMT, i dont pay for links, all that's on the site is original content about food and wine that I enjoy. I've never had a previous drop in ranking/traffic like it.
The one thing I can say, is that the guy who took over the hosting is hosting it himself on his own server and the website has been down more times than I would consider reasonable, often for hours at a time (this is when I catch it and I don't check often).
-
Would the site be penalised for this?
-
If I move servers to a reliable co i normally use, how long will it take to recover?
-
-
I can watch soft 404 errors increase and know there will be a week to two week period with lower SERP scores.
They absolutely can affect your campaign.
-
Hi agree with both Andy and Michael.
If you are going to ditch which seems an unreliable server, make sure your new platform delivers speed. This article by KISSmetrics highlights it's importance http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
Good luck
Gary
-
If the server keeps going down I would also look at and consider page load speed - http://www.webpagetest.org/ because if it is that flaky I would guess performance is poor all round.
I would get to a stable server as quick as possible.
-
Google has said in the past that the odd outage shouldn't be a problem, but if it is like you are saying, then yes, this could be very harmful. Matt Cutts said that if every time someone comes to your site it is down, then it will have a negative impact.
Recovery is a very open-ended question though. It could be a week, a month or 3 months - there is no way to determine this sadly and anything here is going to be guesswork.
I would say to move the site as soon as you can.
-Andy
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
-
Does aggregating content hurt your moz / google rank?
I have a news section on my site that I aggregate from multiple RSS feeds. They are stored on my site and I have sitemap that links to them. Is this a negative thing to do? Since its overall duplicate content to another site, it may be a strike against me. Should I just leave it as an updating feed and not keep the articles visible on my site?
Content Development | | BrickPicker0 -
How can we dynamically populate content on our website based on a visitor's web history?
Recently, I have tried looking into options that would allow us to dynamically populate content (specifically images to be used at CTAs on our blog in wordpress) to different users based on their web history on our website. We would want to be able to dynamically populate images based on the number of visits in the past 60 days and the inferred industry based on pages hit. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find anything as a standalone tool - I believe HubSpot may have something like this but it is rolled into their blogging platform. Does anyone know of one?
Content Development | | SMPoulton0 -
In Index but not in Serps
Hi, I have a situation with a client site which is quite frustrating. Basically, most "recent" (by that I mean for the last couple of months) blog posts are failing to reach the SERPS (actually, one has and a couple have from the early days but it's taken months for them to arrive). Previously the blog posts were indexed very quickly - often instantly. Now, I've checked WMT etc and I've submitted each post manually but still nothing. The Sitemap is valid etc. However, pages (not blog posts) seem to be getting into the serps very quickly. Another complication is that if I search: site:www.domainname.com and set the date filter to a month I can see some of the earlier blog posts in that result set. However, if I scrape a bit of unique content from one of those posts and search - nothing in the SERPS. And my Moz report tells me that the page is not to be found in the top 50 either (so I'm confident these pages are not in the SERPS). Any ideas why this would happen to just blog posts? Is it something to do with the parent blog landing perhaps being too strong in the rankings? Any ideas appreciated. Thanks.
Content Development | | KMUK0 -
Can you help me with my options on publishing others' news releases on my site?
I wish to add a "News" section to a highly-read, highly ranked blog I have. The News pieces will not be in the same flow as my regular posts. I'm contemplating what the best way to do this is, and would like some advice, please. I see these options: Option 1. Pay textbroker type people to rewrite news releases and post them into the news flow. Pro: indexable content. Con: expense. Option 2: Have a Submit News form on the site for vendors to submit their news stories. I would have to ask them to rewrite their stories to avoid dup content. Pros: Easy for me, no cost. Cons: Will still get dup content I bet, a lot of companies won't take the time to do it, and I will have no control over quality. (I really doubt this option will work). Option 3: Post news releases from companies in their raw format, and mark them as no index (even if I don't noindex, they won't move up the SERPs anyway, so why not just noindex them). Pros: very easy, all the news I want. Cons: not creating any indexable content. Bonus question: If I do Option #3, and I place an adsense ad on the page, will it work the same as if it was an indexed, non-duplicate content page? Your thoughts?
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
Can you have too many words on a page for SEO?
One line of thinking is that you can not have too many words on a page because the more words you have the higher the chances that a long tail phrase will attract traffic. But can you go overboard with this? Is there a limit to the number of words on a page in terms of SEO?
Content Development | | ProjectLabs0 -
Can having similar content on my company's two sites hurt our rankings?
We have a very successful website that has been up for a number of years (www.comellaortho.com). We rank high in the natural rankings for that site. A few months ago, we started seeing patients in another nearby city. I purchased a new domain name, www.dansvilleortho.com, and had our web company duplicate the website under the new domain name. The reality is that the content on these two sites are nearly identical. Some of the pages are different; for example, there are fewer pages on the new site. But the pages that do exist are nearly identical. My question is: Can having similar content on my company's two sites hurt our rankings? Based on what I've read thus far, I believe the answer is "Yes". However, I'm curious how bad this may hurt us. I'm not as worried about the new site (dansvilleortho.com) because our competition in that city is slim to none. But I AM worried about harming the original site/business (comellaortho.com). Which site(s) rankings may be affected by this, and if so, how bad? Thank you.
Content Development | | comellortho0 -
How can I rank using translated content?
My friend has a website with similar content to mine, in a different language however. He has allowed me to translate his content if I link to it every post (can be nofollow). Does Google penalize me for clearly translated content? How can I make sure it ranks well? BTW, if I convince him that I don't link to him, is it better SEO-wise? Best,
Content Development | | kikocherman
Cherman0 -
Wordpress Ping List, does pinging Google Help? Could it hurt?
So I was looking at updating my ping list in WP. Some of the lists I have come across have a lot of "blogsearch.google" What does a WP site risk in pinging all of these google properties?
Content Development | | Thos0030