Site drop in SERPS after domain down for three plus weeks
-
Have had a clients site that has been staple in the SERPS for the last four years that we have worked on it. However they had hosting issues a couple of months back which they didn't sort for two to three weeks. Since there the main keyword has bounced around between 24th and 44th in the google results.
The drop ties in with the hosting issue but the client does seem to believe that this is the source of the issue. Can someone point me towards some online articles that would explain this for them.
Some of the keywords have not suffered as badly but the one key term is still in the mid 20's.
I am sure it is suffering a minus 20 for the keyword as it was normally 4th or 5th in the results.
We don't host the site and the client had know idea were it was hosted. What is so annoying is that it is us who pointed out the site was down.
Thanks in advance everyone
-
I've seen more of this post-Caffeine. Now that Google is crawling/indexing faster, site outages can do a lot more damage. Being down for 3 weeks is definitely bad, and it's very likely you'll lost ranking.
It's rare to see any kind of manual penalty, and you should recover - it usually just takes time. You've got to get Google back in action - XML sitemaps (if you don't have them), building up some new links, etc.
This is a quick confirmation from 2006 - I'd say the problem is much worse now:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/server-outages-lead-to-drop-in-search-engine-rankings/3946/
The bigger argument is just that being down 3 weeks is a lot of lost sales, potentially. To not notice you're down and no know where you're hosted is unacceptable for any serious online business, IMO. I'd be wary of any client who cares that little about their business, to be perfectly blunt.
-
that should be stable and not staple although stapling a result high up in the SERPS would be good
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
-
Wrong domain name showing in the SERP
I work with Axos Bank, and the domain name in the SERP started showing axos-services.com a couple of weeks ago. *As a test, search for [axos bank] in Google. You may need to click on "Search instead for axos bank" under "Showing results for axis bank" which is a whole separate issue we want to resolve. They do own axos-services.com, and it redirects to axosbank.com (along with a number of other domains). The SERP has always shown axosbank.com until recently, but the redirect has been in place for some time. Any idea why and how to prompt Google to show the correct domain? Thanks, all!
Technical SEO | | Gildej0 -
Site Not Being Indexed
Hey Everyone - I have a site that is being treated strangely by google (at least strange to me) The site has 24 pages in the sitemap - submitted to WMT'S over 30 days ago I've manually triggered google to crawl the homepage and all connecting links as well and submitted a couple individually. Google has been parked the indexing at 14 of the 24 pages. None of the unindexed URL's have Noindex or follow tags on them - they are clearly and easily linked to from other places on the site. The site is a brand new domain, has no manual penalty history and in my research has no reason to be considered spammy. 100% unique handwritten content I cannot figure out why google isn't indexing these pages. Has anyone encountered this before? Know any solutions? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | CRO_first0 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
Do bad links to a sub-domain which redirects to our primary domain pass link juice and hurt rankings?
Sometime in the distant past there existed a blog.domain.com for domain.com. This was before we started work for domain.com. During the process of optimizing domain.com we decided to 301 blog.domain.com to www.domain.com. Recently, we discovered that blog.domain.com actually has a lot of bad links pointing towards it. By a lot I mean, 5000+. I am curious to hear people's opinions on the following: 1. Are they passing bad link juice? 2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain? 3. The best approach to having these links removed?
Technical SEO | | Shredward0 -
I noticed all my SEOed sites are getting attacked constantly by viruses. I do wordpress sites. Does anyone have a good recommendation to protect my clients sites? thanks
We have tried all different kinds of security plugins but none seem to work long term.
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Site Map
For a long time our site map used to be http://www.efurniturehouse.com/sitemap.xml recently our hosting company changed the site map to: http://www.efurniturehouse.com/xml-sitemap.ashx I went ahead and submitted the new site maps to both Google Webmaster and Bing. I submitted the Google one on Monday and it states PENDING. ( A day later this pending) I just submitted the map to Bing. I now have 2 site maps on each. 1)Is having 2 a problem Will they ignore the old site map or can we delete and if so when can we delete I appreciate your input Regards Tony www.eFurnitureHouse.com
Technical SEO | | OCFurniture0 -
Domain stuck at end of SERPs for main keywords
I'm trying to figure out why a site has been stuck at the end of the SERPs for almost a year. On August 5, 2011 the site went from getting 1,400 visits per day from Google down to 20 visits a day from Google. For the keywords it ranked on the first page for it went to the last page in the SERPs. With Panda and Penguin, it probably wouldn't rank like it used to, but it seems to be stuck in some sort of domain wide penalty that pins it to the end of the SERPs. Even when completely new content will show up at the end of the SERPs, which makes me think it's stuck in some sort of filter. Thanks in advance for any constructive ideas. The site can be reached at: http://ta.gg/5m2
Technical SEO | | poolhall0 -
My site ranking
Hello, I have a website and working more than 1 year ago,I worked hard last year and paid alot to make guys write articles from my website to other forums so my keywords rank high and got good visitors, then I get in much care in SEO and found SEOMoz with is very nice,when I downloaded the tool bar it was a shock to find my website is almost zero although the big effort I had, I can do more but I need to guide what I exactly need to improve my website,I almost read alot of the beginner PDF and got good information to work with and can hire people to help too. I did a real big work sharing my subjects and i can see them in top#5 google but for other sites and now i found I am still zero 😞 adding my links inside also didnt help or counted. attached the statistics of the website and the competitors site to let me know which important things to take care to jump over. would be very thankful for detailed help, Best Regards 1_01308477251.png 1_01308477465.png
Technical SEO | | nesr_20200