Drop of 11 places - server issues?
-
Hi all,
I have experienced a drop of 11 places for our main keyword since our last Moz rankings report which means page 2 to page 3.
I have also received an error 904 in my weekly crawl report two weeks in a row and think this may be the reason for the drop. Could this result in a drop of 11 places?
Last week I also tweeked the H1 tags on my main landing pages, nothing major just a reordering of the words. Could this result in such a major drop?
Final question is does anyone know of any major algorithm update last week that could have affected rankings so drastically?
Thanks all
Gavin -
I experienced a similar issue recently with a client. A few 904 errors seemed to coincide with a notice in the client's 3d cart CMS that they were short on bandwidth. We also saw a VERY significant drop in rankings across the board. We upgraded the hosting plan and the 904 errors went away temporarily, and a very modest improvement in rankings followed, but not a return to normal. It's now about 2-3 months after we first saw the 904 errors and I've just noticed another one that has come up.
-
A 904 error is a timeout. As such this could be on either end of the crawl or in the middle. If you have You should have remote monitoring to measure server uptime and performance. Check the time of the 904 errors with your monitoring. Also review server logs for that period for other errors.
In some cases we have seen security systems block crawlers - especially at larger companies where web app firewalls are in use. The result can be that the system thinks there's an attack and could tarpit the crawler.
This is just speculation but something to easily rule out by looking at your server's logs and monitoring for the period in question.
-
Hi bjs2010
If it was just the 904 error alone I wouldn't be too interested. However it came at the same time as a rankings drop. This also was the second week in a row that I had received the Crawl error 904.
Would be good to know if others got the crawl error notification though? Is there any way to know when SEO.Moz do their crawl as it could be when our server is running some back ups.
Thanks
Gavin -
We got that 904 error also in last weeks crawl. Never ever had it before and we have great hosting. I´m not sure if this could be a Moz issue as opposed to a server issue. Any others experience a 904?
-
If only! We host the website internally and the IT dept who look after the server say there are no issues with the server or network configuration.
The 904 error is on both our sites which are both located on the same server.
The best solution would be to outsource the hosting.
Cheers
Gavin -
Would it be possible for you to change hosts?
-
Thanks Martijn
The drop in rankings is quite significant and comes at the same time as the crawl errors in my reports.
I have 2 websites on the same server and both weekly reports show '904 Response from Server Timed out Without Completing Page Request' and both sites have shown a drop in rankings.
Thanks for your response.
Gavin
-
Hi Gavin,
Most of the updates from the last time that were noteworthy weren't launched last week. Server issues could be an issue that have let your page drop like this, Google could see that your site wasn't stable and have 'decided' that they will put you down for a while to make sure that visitors won't have any issues with your site.
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 fix Category Duplicate Titles Issue?
How to fix Category Duplicate titles and descriptions issues? Most common problem in Wordpress. Example - http://www.abc.com.au/news
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/3
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/4
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/5
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/10
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/6
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/7
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/9
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/80 -
Http - Https Issue
Hey there Mozzers, I have a site that few months ago went from being http - https. All the links redirect perfect but after scanning my site with Screaming Frog i get a bunch of 503 errors. After looking into my website I see that a lot of links in my content and menu have as a link the http url. For example my homepage has content that interlinks to the http version of the site. And even though when I test it it redirects correctly after scanning with Screaming frog it reports back as 503. Any ideas what's going on? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Profit from domain authority, while shop hosted on other server
Hi, What if you have a blog and you want to add a shop to your site (like http://blog.com/shop) to profit from the domain autority, but... the shop uses a specific technique that needs to be hosted on an other server? I know a solution when I locate the shop at http://shop.blog.com by changing the DNS settings, but in this case the shop will not profit from the domain autoriry. So,.. is there a technique (maybe also with DNS?) to host the shop on a different location, but for search engines and visitors it looks like it is on the same server? I hope somebody knows a solution...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders0 -
How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues with Google?
We have 1000s of audio book titles at our Web store. Google's Panda de-valued our site some time ago because, I believe, of duplicate content. We get our descriptions from the publishers which means a good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen
deal of our description pages are the same as the publishers = duplicate content according to Google. Although re-writing each description of the products we offer is a daunting, almost impossible task, I am thinking of re-writing publishers' descriptions using The Best Spinner software which allows me to replace some of the publishers' words with synonyms. I have re-written one audio book title's description resulting in 8% unique content from the original in 520 words. I did a CopyScape Check and it reported "65 duplicates." CopyScape appears to be reporting duplicates of words and phrases within sentences and paragraphs. I see very little duplicate content of full sentences
or paragraphs. Does anyone know whether Google's duplicate content algorithm is the same or similar to CopyScape's? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from CopyScape's duplicate content algorithm? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from Google's duplicate content algorithm?0 -
Help diagnosing a complex SEO issue
Good evening SEOMoz. A series events, in close succession are making it somewhat difficult for me to diagnose a cause of fluctuations in traffic. Please excuse some of the stupid moves I made, but desperation got the better of me. One of my most beloved websites was hit by Panda on January 18th. Pretty sure it was due to a CMS bug that is now fixed. The website site started to show great signs of recovery from April 19th - Panda 3.5. I'm going to be as explicit as possible with the traffic for the days that follow. Traffic was stable previously. April 20th +10%. April 21st +5%. April 22nd +5%. (half way recovered, also the first real fluctuation since the site was hit in Jan). Due to the looming over-optimisation penalty, on the 22nd I changed the titles to unoptimise them a little. (fear is a dangerous thing at times). April 23rd -10%. April 24th -10% April 25th onwards, pretty much levelled out. The websites I've seen hit by Penguin, lost around 40% of their traffic, very steeply on 24th and 25th April. So the drops aren't in keeping with my experience of Penguin. But they do coincide perfectly with the massive site-wide title change. I've haven't read anything definitive about a penalty for changing titles too often, but for obvious reasons, it makes sense. The drop seems terribly soon after changing titles, but the site is very heavily indexed. It's also worth mentioning that I did changed the titles BACK, incase it was purely the fact the titles had been slightly de-optimised, that caused the drop. I waited until May 5th. This had no positive nor negative effect. It's a lot to take in but I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm feeling a little bamboozled looking at all the figures. There was of course the above the fold update on the 19th Jan, but lets ignore that as we've only ever had a max 1 ad per page, most pages have none.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Why do URL with .html or index.php at the end are annoying to the search engine? I heard it can create some duplicate content but I have no idea why? Could someone explain me why is that so? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi I installed a wiki and a forum to subdomains of one of my sites. The crawl report shows me duplicate content on the forum and on wiki. This will hurt the main site? Or the root domain? the site by the way is clean absolutely from errors. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Two Brands One Site (Duplicate Content Issues)
Say your client has a national product, that's known by different brand names in different parts of the country. Unilever owns a mayonnaise sold East of the Rockies as "Hellmanns" and West of the Rockies as "Best Foods". It's marketed the same way, same slogan, graphics, etc... only the logo/brand is different. The websites are near identical with different logos, especially the interior pages. The Hellmanns version of the site has earned slightly more domain authority. Here is an example recipe page for some "WALDORF SALAD WRAPS by Bobby Flay Recipe" http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 http://www.hellmanns.us/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 Both recipie pages are identical except for one logo. Neither pages ranks very well, neither has earned any backlinks, etc... Oddly the bestfood version does rank better (even though everything is the same, same backlinks, and hellmanns.us having more authority). If you were advising the client, what would you do. You would ideally like the Hellmann version to rank well for East Coast searches, and the Best Foods version for West Coast searches. So do you: Keep both versions with duplicate content, and focus on earning location relevant links. I.E. Earn Yelp reviews from east coast users for Hellmanns and West Coast users for Best foods? Cross Domain Canonical to give more of the link juice to only one brand so that only one of the pages ranks well for non-branded keywords? (but both sites would still rank for their branded keyworkds). No Index one of the brands so that only one version gets in the index and ranks at all. The other brand wouldn't even rank for it's branded keywords. Assume it's not practical to create unique content for each brand (the obvious answer). Note: I don't work for Unilver, but I have a client in a similar position. I lean towards #2, but the social media firm on the account wants to do #1. (obviously some functionally based bias in both our opinions, but we both just want to do what will work best for client). Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crvw0