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
-
SEO Ranking: Can Child Theme Compete with Custom Theme?
Ranking for New York City commercial real estate is extremely competitive. We compete against: www.squarefoot.com, www.42floors.com, www.Loopnet.com, www.wework.com and a dozen other optimized sites. Our site was designed in 2012. We plan on upgrading it. From an SEO perspective, can we compete by purchasing a Wordpress real estate theme and customizing it into a child theme? Our better ranking competitors are using custom themes where the code has been very streamlined to make the sites quick and easy to index by spiders. Would we gain a significant edge by custom coding? This is somewhat technical for a business owner and I am trying to get my head around it. Our existing site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Some of the themes we are considering are: -http://main.wpestatetheme.org/homepage -http://houzez01.favethemes.com/ -http://realhomes.inspirythemes.biz/property/ From an SEO perspective is creating a child theme from the above a good approach? Or will a custom theme give us an advantage. If there is an advantage is that edge so marginal that it is not significant? In terms of coding, is a custom site much more labor, 2x, 3x the time to code? Also is the maintenance of a custom site much more involved? Also, as a related question, my developer since 2012 has created many custom plugins for Wordpress. Is this a no, no? Will avoiding custom plugins add to the development cost? Even if we use a child theme from an existing real estate website, I would hope that the improved user interface will provide a boast in at least conversions if not SEO. Thanks, Alan
Web Design | | Kingalan10 -
Website rankings drop significantly after moving to new hosting provider
My website - www.isacleanse.co.nz has dropped from being top10 rankings for all of my keywords to not even being in top 50 after just checking now. It used to be hosted on: www.1stdomains.nz
Web Design | | IsaCleanse
It got migrated to Sitground servers about a month ago See attached screenshot - would moving hosting provider cause such a huge drop? Or would there be anything else I should be looking at ? J2ahi0 -
Moving servers which means moving ip address but using the same URL. Would it harm the website's SEO?
Hello everyone, The server (in-house) which we use to host our website is a bit old. We are using CDN77 for our static content. What if I move all our website to the CDN service? meaning I use their storage capability and just have our url point to the IP address they provide. Would that hurt our rankings?
Web Design | | Edgar-Cerecerez0 -
Lost Rankings Late April Even Though We Have A Mobile Site
I have noticed a significant drop in rankings since late April. It is about a 30% drop in organic from Google. This is despite the fact that we launched a mobile site before the update. What gives? Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Web Design | | inhouseseo0 -
When Site:Domain Search Run on Google, SSL Error Appears on One URL, Will this Harm Ranking
Greetings MOZ Community: When a site:domain search is run on Google, a very strange URL appears in the search results. The URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com:2082/ The page displays a "the site's security certificate is not trusted." This only appears for one URL out of 400. Could this indicate a wider problem with the server's configuration? Is this something that needs to be corrected, and if so how? Our ranking has dropped a lot in the last few months. Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Affected by the Penguin 2.0...Lost Rankings!! Which one from the following causes did that?
Hi Moz Community, we lost our rankings for almost all of our keywords due to penguin 2.0 I'm trying to rectify the situation by getting our rankings back and better. Here are the potential causes for our rankings drop. 1. My Company has the exact same site (in English) on different country-specific domains. companyname.com, companyname.ch, companyname.ca, companyname.nl etc.. We are using link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://companyname.com" **Would this solve the duplicate content issue? ** 2. All the international domains have footer links in the homepages, pointing to our main .com site. Google webmaster tools shows that every page on these international domains as a backlink source. Would that be a problem? Should I ask our web designers to remove those footer links from the international domains? 3. In the past, our company had a partnership with forum...Like the forum promotes our company's services. I don't know how did that forum promoted our site, But Google webmaster tools shows that we have some 25K backlinks from that forum!!! But when I try to visit those backlinks, none of those pages have any links to our site....Could they be hidden? Or Some thing wrong with GWT? I'd appreciate your valuable suggestions to help us understand the situation better... Thank you.
Web Design | | hninformer0 -
Can SEO Moz perform a full site crawl and provide a report showing all URLs within an existing domain?
We are conducting a site redesign and need to get an idea of all pages that are out there on our domain (in some report fashion). This would help for discovery and cleanup as we re-work the site and move to a new CMS. Thanks
Web Design | | DCondon0