SeoMoz Crawler Shuts Down The Website Completely
-
Recently I have switched servers and was very happy about the outcome. However, every friday my site shuts down (not very cool if you are getting 700 unique visitors per day). Naturally I was very worried and digged deep to see what is causing it. Unfortunately, the direct answer was that is was coming from "rogerbot". (see sample below)
Today (aug 5) Same thing happened but this time it was off for about 7 hours which did a lot of damage in terms of seo. I am inclined to shut down the seomoz service if I can't resolve this immediately.
I guess my question is would there be a possibility to make sure this doesn't happen or time out like that because of roger bot. Please let me know if anyone has answer for this. I use your service a lot and I really need it.
Here is what caused it from these error lines:
216.244.72.12 - - [29/Jul/2011:09:10:39 -0700] "GET /pregnancy/14-weeks-pregnant/ HTTP/1.1" 200 354 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)"
216.244.72.11 - - [29/Jul/2011:09:10:37 -0700] "GET /pregnancy/17-weeks-pregnant/ HTTP/1.1" 200 51582 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)"
-
After much research and implementing ton of added scripts on my apache server to track it - the bots did effect the shutdown. However, for this not to happen to you or if you ever have a problem of that nature this is how I resolved it.
It is an excellent article about how to implement the script to restart immediately once all available threads for apache are exhausted and your apache crashes. The script basically check apache server status every 5 min and in an event that it crashed - it will automatically restart it and send you an email notification. I say pretty good deal for risking to be offline only 5 min if anything major happens. Just as well I am also running a cron job every morning at 1am to restart apache. Please note that you need to have knowledge of SSH commands and manipulations in order for this to happen. And OMG I am talking like a geek... All the best to you...
-
Wow Randy, what a story man. Actually the funny part is one of the jobs I do is monitor for things like that - but I would not go that far to actually shut someone's site down - precisely for the reason of knowing what that could do. It is great thing to know that for 5 days you still preserved your ranking. That makes me feel so much better. I am keeping the rule of 1 dedicated server per 2 domains (both related). In this whole case we are talking about a domain called babylifetime.com. I am about to embark on a journey of custom development for site similar to squarespace.com but with much more addons - so I need this thing to work properly. I think I got this SEO in organic arena pretty well, but again things like the issue in this thread are what is keeping me on my toes.
-
Googlebot would have to be indexing your site at the very moment that it was down for anything to happen and even if it's down for a half a day, from my experience, rankings are unaffected.
However, there's a small side-effect. If visitors that are coming from X, Y or Z engine, visit your site and there is a 404 or Server Error and they click the back button or get the "Google Can't Find This" page, it can, for that period of time increase your bounce rate. If the originating click starts at say Google and then the clicker goes back to google, it tells google that the page wasn't what they were looking for in relation to the term that they used, or that it didn't load, or that there is a problem with it. Basically any reason that can be tied to bounce rate.
As alarming as that may sound, I don't believe that it would effect your rankings.
The easiest way to see if Google noticed is to log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account and check for errors. If they list any errors such as 404 or "server unavailable" (which I'm not sure they have that one) for any pages that you know are usually live and well, then you'll know they noticed.
But again, I'm not under the belief that it will largely effect your rankings. I've read from Google's words that they do go back to sites that were unavailable or down and try to continue their index.
As for your server being down for 12 hours. That's a lengthy amount of time. I can't even imagine it. You might want to check your hosting capabilities. You should be back up and running in minutes, not hours.
Just to give you a some piece of mind. I have a plethora of affiliate sites that make a small income for me. I once registered a domain name that a very large corporation didn't appreciate. It had a trademarked word in the domain. Long story short, my domain info was set to private so they got legally got the server shut down. I didn't know for days because everything was on auto-pilot and I wasn't checking my related email addresses. When that server was shut down, 100+ websites on that server went down too because that one trademarked (partially) domain was on the same server and same hosting package. The sites were down for about 5 or 6 days while I sorted through the legal paperwork. After I made an agreement to give the big company the domain, minus the 20K in damages that they originally wanted, the hosting company turned the server and hosting package back on.
Not a single one of the domains lost ranking. Not even 1 spot! Today, they still rank in the top 2 to 3 of their biggest terms. So my words are truly from experience and are from a worst-case scenario. I think you'll be fine.
Finally, to clear the air. I didn't do anything bad, nor would I ever do anything bad with a domain name (other than keep it in my portfolio). The big company was upset that I got the domain before they did. All I had on the index page was their description of their product that was named in the domain. That was enough to be taken down for copyright and trademark infringement.
In the end, that company was actually very cool about it. And it's a Fortune 10 company! I was surprised!
-
EGOL thanks for your reply.
A) Also my latest though is that unusual activity is blocking it. But then again, it is dedicated server and should be capable of handling it separately. We are talking about SeoMoz bot and highest dedicated GoDaddy server. Without anything specifically installed to interfere with apache server.
B) RAM, bandwidth, space, PHP memory and other memory limits etc. is all under 20% of actual use.
-
I am willing to bet that the root issue is with the host and one of these situations is occurring: A) the host is throttling your processor resources and shutting your domain down after unusual activity occurs on your site.... B) total activity on the server (your site and other sites) exceed a certain level and the server limits resource available for processing.
I would be looking for a new host.
-
Randy thanks for the response. There is definitely something going on related directly to rogerbot on the server. I have different crawlers running at all times and nothing ever happens. This particular problem ties in when seomoz bots start doing their job (fridays) and is backtracked to specific bot.As for delay. I tried different ones up to 20 - but same problem persists.
At the moment I have tech team reviewing apache server to see specifics of this. I will also post it here for other to see when I find out.
But it is weird and now I don't know when the site will shut down. Driving me crazy man!
As additional question to this thread: When your site goes down for lets say 12 hours and you have many organic google high ranked listings. Does that have huge impact or what is acceptable?
-
Jury,
I'm not sure if rogerBot is doing anything to you site but I do know a way to slow rogerBot and any other robot / crawler which takes directions from the robots.txt file that should be on your site.
Basically, just add the two lines of code that are represented below to your robots.txt file. With this addition, you are telling the useragent (rogerBot) to take 10 seconds between pages. You can change that number to anything you want. The more seconds you add, the slower it goes. And this of course is if rogerBot takes directions. I'm fairly sure it does!
NON-AGENT SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
User-Agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 10
EXAMPLE FOR ROGERBOT
User-Agent: rogerBot
Crawl-Delay: 10
Good Luck,
Randy -
Thanks Lewis...I will do that and see if they have any suggestions...!
-
Hi Jury
If you haven't already i would recommend raising the issue through the help email address help@seomoz.org
On the Q&A forum we can pass thoughts or suggestions but the support team at seomoz will be best placed to answer this.
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 anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links?which one is better to rank a website? i am looking for the help for one of my website
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links? which one is better to rank a website? I am looking for help for one of my website vacuum cleaners
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hshajjajsjsj3880 -
Website cache has removed
Hi Team, I am facing an issue with cache of the website, despite various r&d I couldn't able to find the solution as code seems to be ok to me. Can any one of you check and let me know why home page and some of the product pages removed from the caching. See here: https://bit.ly/2Kna3PD Appreciate a quick response! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
Installing SSL to website and site ranking
I am installing SSL to my website. Will it hurt my ranking in Google as the url will change and backlinks of the website are without ssl url.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Esnipper0 -
Old Website Build Effecting SEO
So this is a bit of a strange one. My latest website was built on a different domain, then transferred over (as opposed to being built on a subdomain). I was told that the domain which my site was built on wasn't indexed by Google, but looking at the Google Search Console I can see that the old domain name is showing up as the most linked to domain name of my current site - meaning it was indexed. The domain (and all of its pages) does have a 301 redirect to the new website home page (as opposed to their individual pages), but could this be causing me a problem with SEO? Additionally, my website has a sister (UK and US websites), both link to each other on the footer (which appears on every page). Could this be pulling my SEO efforts down if it is a do-follow link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Two websites vs. one for SEO
I recently met with a new potential client who currently has two websites for his business - one that is for the business as a whole and another that is specific to one of his particular services (his main service and what the overall business is known for). My first question was "why do you have two websites?" His response was that he has had a really hard time ranking well organically for his main service. He worked with an SEO company for two years and never was able to establish a solid organic presence for searches related to his main service - so he went ahead and had a site built to focus specifically on that service with the hope that it would help him rank organically for searches related to that service. The new site was built very recently (Dec. 2014) and it hasn't had a lot of optimization work put into it. The original site has a much higher Domain Authority, more incoming links, etc. My typical preference has always been to use one website and drive all traffic to that site, while building out specific content for any products/services on individual pages of the site. For some reason I'm torn as to what to do with this particular situation since his main concern is ranking for his core service, which hasn't happened with the original site. I'm concerned, though, that optimizing and managing two websites will be less effective than driving all of the traffic to one site, and that it could actually be detrimental overall. What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Feel free to let me know if you need any more details.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
Same website, seperate subfolders or separete websites? 12 stores in two cities
I have a situation where there are 12 stores in separate suburbs across two cities. Currently the chain store has one eCommerce website. So I could keep the one website with all the attendant link building benefits of one domain. I would keep a separate webpage for each store with address details to assist with some Local SEO. But (1) each store has slightly different inventory and (2) I would like to garner the (Local) SEO benefits of being in a searchers suburb. So I'm wondering if I should go down the subfolder route with each store having its own eCommerce store and blog eg example.com/suburb? This is sort of what Apple does (albeit with countries) and is used as a best practice for international SEO (according to a moz seminar I watched awhile back). Or I could go down the separate eCommerce website domain track? However I feel that is too much effort for not much extra return. Any thoughts? Thanks, Bruce.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMcG0 -
Regional websites
Hi, I run 4 websites London, New York, Singapore and Dubai. Same company but some of our products are different in each region. Each domain is registered in the relevant region and I have google webmaster tools set so they know the location of each website. The problem is that our Dubai and US websites are appearing higher that the UK website in google.co.uk organic. Does anyone have any ideas why? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830 -
SEOMoz mistaking image pages as duplicate content
I'm getting duplicate content errors, but it's for pages with high-res images on them. Each page has a different, high-res image on it. But SEOMoz keeps telling me it's duplicate content, even though the images are different (and named different). Is this something I can ignore or will Google see it the same way too?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHT0