Site went down and traffic hasn't recovered
-
Very curious situation. We have a network of sites. Sunday night one (only one) of our sites goes down, and since then we've seen a loss in traffic across all our sites!! Not only have we seen a loss of traffic, we also saw a loss of indexed pages. A complete drop off from 1.8 million to 1.3 million pages indexed.
Does anyone know why one site outtage would affect the rest of them? And the indexed pages? Very confused.
Thanks,
-
My indexation number went back to normal for 2/3 sites. But for one of my sites, the number still hasn't returned to normal. Do you have any idea as to why this might be? Do you think it's a bug with Google?
-
WOW that's the exact date that my index number went down! That is a huge relief, but at the same time I'm still concerned that my traffic went down during that time. Thank you for sharing the video.
-
Hi,
Just a note on the indexation drop, it seems Google has adjusted how they display this figure, so if you're referring to Google Search Console for your indexation stats, this may explain it:
http://searchengineland.com/google-adjusted-how-they-show-index-count-estimates-230158
Hope it helps!
-
Thank you Dmitrii for your response.
No, our sites were not hit by manual actions, I checked out GWT for that. But yes, they do link to each other a lot and provide a very reasonable amount of referral traffic to each other. It's not necessarily a network, it's just a handful of domains that have different content, audiences and pages that happen to be owned by the same company. So no, it's not a network in the spammy sense.
But, you do provide a good point about the duplicate content and rankings. I will check those to see if it could have any affect. There was a panda refresh around this time so perhaps that added to our troubles.
-
Thank you for your response, Michael.
No, the site isn't down anymore. It was down for a couple of hours. We are getting traffic again, but not to the level it was at before. I have already checked the robots.txt file, but I will try the Fetch and Render suggestion as well.
Thanks!
-
Hi.
"Network of sites" always makes my spam sensors tingle Please provide more information on the structure. Now, why did that website go down? Server problems? Have you checked the manual actions in GWT for those websites? You sure you're not being hit by some kinda penalization?
Now, the larger total number of indexed pages not necessarily means that it's good or would help your rankings/traffic. As well as deindexing does not mean the opposite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVOrml7fp2c However, the usual reasons of deindexing are connected/related to spammy techniques or duplicate content. What does your GWT crawling stats say? Was there a spike recently?
How about rankings of your websites? Did they go down as well? If so, then what happened first?
Since it's a "network", do those websites link to each other? do they link to each other a lot? Is it that much that the most of backlink profile of those websites are links from each other?
Anyway, the easiest explanation which comes to my head is (assuming that it's a "network of websites"):
Websites have links to each other -> One of them goes down -> Google sees that links went missing -> lowers the rankings (since backlink profile got worse) -> traffic goes down.
-
Is that site still down? Typically when I've seen sites go down, unless it's for a long time, Google doesn't seem to drop it from the index. I had a client site down all day Saturday and it continued to rank well.
And I don't see a reason why that would affect the other sites, unless a huge percentage of their inbound links were from the site that was down--but even then, it would have to be down weeks, at least.
I'm inclined to think that the site outage is a red herring, and that there's something else in common between the sites that's causing an issue. Have you done a fetch-and-render as Googlebot for each of the sites in Search Console? Maybe something is blocked by robots.txt in all the sites that's preventing rendering, and Google is seeing very little content above the fold? <-- bit of a wild guess there...but that's all I've got!
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
-
How to use Google search console's 'Name change' tool?
Hi There, I'm having trouble performing a 'Name change' for a new website (rebrand and domain change) in Google Search console. Because the 301 redirects are in place (a requirement of the name change tool), Google can no longer verify the site, which means I can't complete the name change? To me, step two (301 redirect) conflicts with step there (site verification) - or is there a way to perform a 301 redirect and have the tool verify the old site? Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated. Cheers Ben
Technical SEO | | cmscss0 -
Generation 'child' sitemaps?
First off, am I correct in thinking that a 'child' sitemap is a sitemap of a subfolder and everything that sits under it, i.e. www.example.com/example If so, can someone give me a good recommendation for generation a free child sitemap please? Many thanks, Rhys
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Any SEO-wizards out there who can tell me why Google isn't following the canonicals on some pages?
Hi, I am banging my head against the wall regarding the website of a costumer: In "duplicate title tags" in GSC I can see that Google is indexing a whole bunch parametres of many of the url's on the page. When I check the rel=canonical tag, everything seems correct. My costumer is the biggest sports retailer in Norway. Their webshop has approximately 20 000 products. Yet they have more than 400 000 pages indexed by Google. So why is Google indexing pages like this? What is missing in this canonical?https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=descWhy isn't Google just cutting off the ?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=desc part of the url?Can it be the canonical-tag itself, or could the problem be somewhere in the CMS? Looking forward to your answers Sigurd
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Webmaster tools not showing links but Moz OSE is showing links. Why can't I see them in the Google Search Console
Hi, Please see attached photos. I have a website that shows external follow links when performing a search on open site explorer. However, they are not recognised or visible in search console. This is the case for both internal and external links. The internal links are 'no follow' which I am getting developer to rectify. Any ideas why I cant see the 'follow' external links? Thanks in advance to those who help me out. Jesse T7dkL5s T7dkL5s OkQmPL4 3qILHqS
Technical SEO | | jessew0 -
Consistent top 10 in G image search - but a different 'stolen' version every time!
I have a photo that was uploaded back in 2005. It is an aerial shot and has received a fair bit of traffic over the years. I'm pretty sure it was ranked #1 in Google Images for the town name for a while. Now, however, it never ranks. Well actually it does. But every single time it is a version on a different website that is being used without permission.
Technical SEO | | Cornwall
And I'm not talking about one website. Every time I fill out a DMCA and have the image removed only to see a completely different website featuring in the top 10. This has happened 5 times so far and I'm just about to fill out another DMCA request. What is going on? Surely Google in its infinite wisdom is smart enough to check the timestamp or date cues on page to figure out which is the original. These other sites are often complete unknowns compared to my site which is a 12yr old authority site on the subject.
Don't get it!0 -
I am getting an error message from Google Webmaster Tools and I don't know what to do to correct the problem
The message is:
Technical SEO | | whitegyr
"Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.whitegyr.com/, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team" I have always tried to follow Google's guidelines and don't know what I am doing wrong, I have eight different websites all getting this warning and I don't know what is wrong, is there anyone you know that will look at my sites and advise me what I need to do to correct the problem? Website with this warning:
artistalaska.com
cosmeticshandbook.com
homewindpower.ws
montanalandsale.com
outdoorpizzaoven.net
shoes-place.com
silverstatepost.com
www.whitegyr.com0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
What's the best way to switch over to a new site with a different CMS?
Is it better to 301 or to closely duplicate each page URL when switching over to a new website from an established site with good ranking and a different CMS ( Drupal switching to Wordpress)?
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve0