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You can also link your webmaster and analytics accounts together. Hopefully they'll make all the data visible in analytics in an easy to use manner.

Hi Daniel,

I'm afraid I don't know the specifics as the hosting company were very secretive and awkward. However what I do know is that their firewalls were incorrectly flagging Google as trying to perform and DDOS attack on the server. By this I presume they meant Google's spiders were being blocked. I don't know any more details than that but I hope it gives you a starting point to work from.

Regards

Ric

A little update for everyone. The problem has been resolved now for nearly two weeks (seems the firewall thought Google was a DDOS attack!) so I've been able to monitor the early response. It looks like the site is bouncing back well to where it previously was.

The website seems accessible to everyone but Google, if it was fully down wwe'd get them to move ASAP. We're definitely going to try and convince our client to move again now we've some ammo!

The site is actually hosted with our local telecommunications provider and it wasn't just the web hosting that was effected, nearly everyone on the island where I live had very unreliable internet connectivity for a few weeks, they're just lucky they have little to no competition.

Hello,

We've being doing SEO work for a company for about 8 months and it's been working really well, we've lots of top threes and first pages.

Or rather we did.

Unfortunately the web host who the client uses (who to recommended them not to) has had severe DNS problems. For the last three weeks Google has been unable to access and index the website. I was hoping this was going to be a quickly resolved and everything return to normal. However this week their listing have totally dropped, 25 page one rankings has become none, Google Webmaster tools says 'Google couldn't access your site because of a DNS error'. Even searching for their own domain no longer works!

Does anyone know how this will effect the site in the long term? Once the hosts sort it out will the rankings bounce back. Is there any sort of strategy for handling this problem? Ideally we'd move host but I'm not sure that is possible so any other options, or advice on how it will affect long term rankings so I can report to my client would be appreciated.

Many thanks

Ric

Hi,

I know this has been asked a few times before but I want to clarify everything my own head.

We've recently relaunched a website for a client that combined three existing sites into one.

The new site is http://www.gowerpensions.com/

I've added 301 rewrite rules to the three old domains to to point to the correct page on the new website, i.e the old contact page goes to the new one, the about page to the new about page etc, etc.

The old domains are thehorizonplan.com, horizonqrops.com and horizonqnups.com. I've informed Google Webmaster Tools of the change.

The client also has several other domains such as horizonpensions.com and qnupscheme.com.

Am I correct in thinking I should not park these domains on top of the gowerpensions.com website as this will be seen as duplicate content? I don't think there is anything linking to these domains. They might not even be listed in Google.

With the thehorizonplan.com, horizonqrops.com and horizonqnups.com domains there are existing links to them, but will parking these on top of gowerpensions.com cause a problem, or should I keep my 301 redirects forever?

Would a better strategy be to make microsites on all of the satellite domains that link to the main one to create more relevant links? If this is the case then I'd need to fix any third party links to the old horizon domains.

I hope that makes sense.

Thanks

Ric

You want your redirect rules on the server, not client site. In Apache you can do this with mod_write and the .htaccess file like so.

To add the www

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

To remove the www:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

In IIS they have a rewrite command too. I've not used it myself but this should help: http://www.petermoss.com/post/How-to-redirect-non-www-domain-to-www-domain-requests-in-IIS-7.aspx

Another useful feature is the ability to remove pages from the index. I've needed to do this a couple times. It's free and only takes a few minutes to set up so I'd do it for every site. Google seem to be developing and refreshing a lot of things at the moment too so I am sure Google Webmaster Tools will only improve with time.

I'd make sure you have canonical links too. Google has a page dedicated to them here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394