Server performance and loss of rankings
-
Hi all
Wondering if anyone knows how much poor server performance is needed to affect your Google rankings. A few sites of mine were performing fine until about 11am today, since then the site traffic is down about 99% (eeek) at the same time the server was playing up with a server load about 40 - it's 12core, 64ram. I was having database issues at the time too.
Surely Google doesn't work that fast in demoting sites for poor performance does it? If not need I need to ponder other reasons why i have no traffic anymore.
Thanks,
Carl
-
Thanks will check out the post. To be very honest the affiliate sites were very iffy in quality. They had little in the way of unique content and were more a working test of Matt Cutts' notion that if you put lots of differently sourced duplicate content on one page then the page won't be treated as unique. It appears I was wrong!
I'm not fussed about these sites, they made a bit of money but their main purpose was to test the content theory as we are considering adding a few affiliate type products into our proper magento site. I think it's safe to say that the working hypothesis that lots of different bits of duplicate content = one unique page is very much disproved, hehe.
Lesson for next time...if trying to get a site banned by google (which was pretty much the aim of the test). do it on a different server to the proper websites.
Time to buy a new ip for the magento stores just to be safe
-
Hey Carl,
Eek, that's not good. If the affiliate sites had other things in common with your main businesses as well (registration information, for example), Google can easily take action against sites it considers to be in the same network as spam. They can and have blacklisted IPs in the past. They can appear almost vindictive in this manner. Former Mozzer Matt Inman had his entire network of sites wiped out after engaging in questionable link building practices on a few of them. He wrote about it here. It was a while ago but still relevant.
Do you know what would have triggered the pure spam penalty?
I'm not getting jofdallin.co.uk to load at all: http://i.imgur.com/Z4R4QyD.png
-
quick update on my most recent reply. Have worked out the reason for the affiliate site drops. Google seems to have taken a dislike to them. Just received the rather direct WMT message of
'Google has detected that some of your pages may be using techniques that are outside our Webmaster Guidelines.
As a result of your site having pure spam, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxx/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.'
While this is annoying, the affiliate sites were neither here nor there. I did foolishly host them on the same server and IP as my proper magento stores so have to hope they haven't penalised the IP
-
Hi, thanks for the reply.
If anything the traffic is worse today. I have a few other sites on the server which contain a mixture of duplicate content (affiliate data feeds) and unique articles, in addition to my 'proper' sites of pure 100% unique content. The affiliate stuff makes a few easy pennies on the side. These sites too lost a lot of traffic. Oddly several of the sites now do not even appear in Google for a site: search, yet no message is in webmaster tools so the puzzlement continues.
After running a few tests on the domains which are still indexed i see pages listed when i do a site: but when i search for the page title it is not there.
I have noticed that i seem to have a 1gb php error file (eeek) and that is going up at a fair rate so will see if that is anything to do with it, the bots may be scared off by the error messages - not reported in WMT though.
Ive hundreds of thousands of these...
[25-Mar-2014 17:06:24 UTC] PHP Warning: Module 'PDO' already loaded in Unknown on line 0
-
HI Carl,
The traffic issue will definitely be due to your server problems, rather than a loss of rankings - I would guess that you are still seeing no traffic in GA due to the lag in reporting time. Are things back to normal now?
If you are not running ranking reports in Moz Analytics, have you run some test searches on terms you know you normally rank for to see if the site is still there?
A site has to be performing badly for a fairly extended period to lose all of its rankings, although it is best practice to serve 500s instead of 404s if the site is going to be down entirely (sounds like yours were up, just very slow). A 404 instructs Google that the requested resource is gone forever; 500 is an error message and indicates that the resource will return.
If your site was loading okay but just taking a very long time, I definitely doubt that this could cause ranking issues.
-
Paul,
Thanks for the quick reply. No, no errors in WMT. There is a little duplicate content on the product page - the description is the same as that supplied by the manufacturer, and thus, used by many other sites. However, while there is 100 word or so which is the same, there is at least 500 - 700 words which are unique to the site so hopefully that would rule out a duplicate content thing.
-
You're going to have to keep digging deeper, Carl. There's no way server load issues today caused those kinds of ranking issues so quickly.
As for traffic drop, of course you'll see lower traffic numbers if the server was unable to serve pages to a large portion of your potential visitors. However, also remember that Google Analytics generally lags about 12 - 18 hrs behind in its reporting of data.
As for the rankings issues, you've confirmed there's no manual penalty mentioned in Webmaster Tools? If no penalty, I'd be tempted to just leave things alone for a day or two and see if this is a glitch that will sort itself out. There's nothing worse than messing around with a bunch of stuff only to find there was nothing actually wrong in the first place, just a reporting glitch.
I would definitely get an uptime monitoring tool in place with 1-minute checks (Pingdom) if you don't already have one. You need a good record of exactly what the site availability is so you cross-reference outages with Analytics traffic.
Hope that helps a little?
Paul
-
As a follow up, sorry I know it makes it hard to help but I cannot give out the site name im afraid, I just did a site: search in Google and found all my pages listed (not been banned, that's a start!) however, copying the full title from one of the pages and pasting it into google using " " returns no results. If i try without " " it returns 10 results - none duplicate,s just sites happening to match a brand name in my title - however none of the ten are my page.
So, the page is discoverable via a site: search but not via a keyword search. Very odd. If it were a +x penalty then surely I would still appear just at the bottom of the listings?
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
-
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages?
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. The 3 locations old domains were redirected to their sites within our main brand domain. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages? And possibly increase our domain authority hopefully? We didn't want our brand spread out over multiple websites/domains on the internet. This also allowed for more content to be written on pages, per each of our locations service's, as well.
Web Design | | BurgSimpson0 -
Any risks involved in removing a sub-domain from search index or completely taking down? Ranking impact?
Hi all, One of our sub-domains has thousands of indexed pages but traffic is very less and irrelevant. There are links between this sub-domain to other sub domains of ours. We are planning to take this subdomain completely. What happens if so? Google responds for this with a ranking change? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Website Redesign and Migration to Squarespace killed my Ranking
My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words. I just redesigned my website using Squarespace. I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible. Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host. And our new website was live! ...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion. I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice. Is this the case? And, if so, how do I fix it? Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca Thanks
Web Design | | StillLearning1 -
Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings
Hi, Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings. Our desktop site & mobile site has same urls. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Is it important to keep your website home index page simple to rank better?
My website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ markets holiday cottages and it's grown from my own singular cottage into a small letting agency and I used to rank at best number 3 for the short tailed keywords like Whitby holiday cottages with its drop-down to position 10 on Google.co.uk. So this week I was looking for a UK business to help me improve my rankings and the first thing they said was my home page is detrimental with the listing too many conflicting info with it advertising all 12 properties on it. They suggested a door entry page into the site keeping it simple but when I run it through the analysing tool here on Moz for "Whitby holiday cottages" as an example it came out looking okay. I do the usual things of title tags and meta descriptions for my keywords etc any suggestions or advice would be very welcome thank you Alan
Web Design | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
Getting a highly ranked site a better result for 1 search term
I have a highly ranked website for a niche category. My site ranks higher in SEOMOZ than all of my competitors, but I can't get any higher than 4th on a page for one specific search term. What can I do to help my site increase its ranking on a specific search term?
Web Design | | tadden0 -
301 Redirect ! Joomla Pages, Already ranking. ( just wanted to change the url
hey guys hope everyone had a new year. I am ranking for a page on my site that i want to ( not specifically move ), but just change the url name: It is too long i think and i want to move it from one portion of my architecture to another menu. I have never physically done a 301 redirect myself, always had someone do it for me. I wanted some pointers. Since it is a fairly new site 4 months old! What are my options. Do i need to 301 redirect the page, if i am changing the Structure and AI of my site, or can i just change the url as is and it will still get ranked? How do i keep that url put delete the page and redirect it ? Sorry its very simple but i wanted to get the communities help to continue on ! Best Wishes HAmpig
Web Design | | BizDetox0 -
Non-performing keyword
We recently completely started over with our website. I didn't mind not ranking for these keywords for a while because through extensive TV commercials our branded keywords perform the best for us anyway. However, a month and a half later, all but one keyword is ranking in the top 3 pages on Google. We are using Joomla! CMS and I first suspected that it may be a problem, but all of my crawl results are good. I think Joomla sites look good and are really easy for clients to edit on their own. I would really like to keep offering Joomla sites, but if this is the cause, I may need to reconsider. I have a few links to the page and I do know that I need more, but I have pages and keywords with fewer backlinks and harder keywords that are ranking. I have been busy with clients and unable to spend a lot of time on MY site ( My grandma always told me, " The Shoemaker's kids go barefoot"). I'm wondering if anyone can take a peek and help me over this hump? It's probably something stupid, and the rest of my sites are performing on the 1st page for their keywords, so I must be doing something right 😉 . I'm just not sure what I'm not seeing. The page in question is http://wootencomputer.com/internet-marketing/web-design and keyword I'm going for is: web design greenville sc Thank you all so much in advance. Also, I should add that with our past sites, we've ranked very well with this keyword.
Web Design | | NatalieWooten0