Server down - What will happen to the SERP?
-
Hi everybody, we have a lot of websites (about 100) on one Server in Italy. This Server crashed 5 days ago and now it should go online (I hope!).
What will happen to the SERP? What shall I do to recover the rank of every key? New links, new content, just wait...what?
Tnks
-
Samuele-
Sorry to hear that the server was down for five days. That's not a lot of fun to deal with.
Here's a great link to an interview by Matt Cutts about Website downtime and how it affects Google rankings:
Basically, if the server is down for a day, you're fine. More downtime than that, though, and Google sees this as a signal that the user experience might not be amazing.
My recommendations to prevent this from happening again:
1. Back up each site to at least two locations. In the case that a server like this goes down, you can migrate the sites to a different host quickly. Make sure you have the database + the site contents backed up. I recommend backing up locally to a hard drive, as well as another cloud-based site, too. For a critical site, it may be worth having a "hot" backup site that can be pushed live via DNS quickly and easily. For a site with 100+ sites on it, make sure you have a list of all of the sites on the server, and order them in importance of what is most critical to work on first.
2. Make sure that the DNS doesn't route through the server with 100+ sites on it. Use the DNS controls at your domain name registrar, instead. That way you can quickly re-route the DNS to go to a new hosting platform, and not have to wait for the server to come back up.
3. Consider moving to a different hosting platform that has more uptime / reliability. 100+ sites on a server is a lot of eggs in a basket. (Note: I've done something similar in the past, and it's not worth it to have all of those sites sitting together on a shared server. Better to break them up and put them on several different servers if possible.)
Finally, once the site is back up, I'd try to bolster the importance of the site with additional relevant content, inbound links, social media, etc. I might suggest a permission-based email campaign to past customers to bring them back, and let them know about the site outage.
Hope this helps...
-- Jeff
-
Yup, just wait. However, I would consider switching to a better server, a 5 day downtime is a long downtime! Look for more reliable solution.
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
-
Backlink Indexing - will this technique hurt or help?
So I came across this idea on YouTube: Indexing your backlinks. I understand its not enough to just have google crawl your pages - you want them indexed. So, if you create backlinks on say a blog or social profile, will it benefit you to have them submitted to other popular blogs, news / pr sites, video channels - of which may be unrelated - for the sole purpose of getting them not just crawled but indexed? There are SEO companies that I have seen that claim they do exactly that (publish your backlinks all over the web - making backlinks for backlinks) but in reality is this a good thing or a bad thing? Could this help rankings or hurt them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | momentum_technology_services0 -
Image redirection: Will it helps or hurts?
Hi all, There are some old images (non-existing now) from our website which have backlinks. We would like to redirect them to some live images to reclaim the backlinks. Is this Okay or sounds suspicious to Google? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Why is this site performing so well in the SERP's and getting high traffic volume for no apparent reason!
The site is https://virtualaccountant.ie/ It's a really small site They have only about 7 back links, They don't blog They don't have a PPC campaign They don't stand out from the crowd in terms of product or services offered So why are they succeeding in topping the SERP's for difficult to rank for accounting keywords such as accountant and online accounts. What are they doing better than everyone else, or have they discovered a way to cheat Google, and worse still - ME!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterConnor0 -
If Google Authorship is used for every page of your website, will it be penalized?
Hey all, I've noticed a lot of companies will implement Google Authorship on all pages of their website, ie landing pages, home pages, sub pages. I'm wondering if this will be penalized as it isn't a typical authored piece of content, like blogs, articles, press releases etc. I'm curious as I'm going to setup Google Authorship and I don't want it to be setup incorrectly for the future. Is it okay to tie each page (home page, sub pages) and not just actual authored content (blogs, articles, press releases) or will it get penalized if that occurs? Thanks and much appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Will aggregating external content hurt my domain's SERP performance?
Hi, We operate a website that helps parents find babysitters. As a small add- on we currently run a small blog with the topic of childcare and parenting. We are now thinking of introducing a new category to our blog called "best articles to read today". The idea is that we "re-blog" selected articles from other blogs that we believe are relevant for our audience. We have obtained the permission from a number of bloggers that we may fully feature their articles on our blog. Our main aim in doing so is to become a destination site for parents. This obviously creates issues with regard to duplicated content. The question I have is: will including this duplicated content on our domain harm our domains general SERP performance? And if so, how can this effect be avoided? It isn't important for us that these "featured" articles rank in SERPs, so we could potentially make them "no index" sites or make the "rel canonical" point to the original author. Any thoughts anyone? Thx! Daan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | daan.loening0 -
Next Step to Improve SERPS?
Hello... Just looking for some opinions on what my next steps should be in regards to improving my rankings in the SERPS. Most of my category and subcategory pages (as well as the home page) have received grades of "A" on SEOMOZ's on page grader... None of my competitors have as much or as unique of content as I do. My question to all of you SEO genius' and experts (i mean that as a great compliment, not sarcasm) is what would your next steps be in terms of moving up in the search results? My url is : http://goo.gl/XUH3f Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Prime850 -
Why Proved Spammers are on 1st Google SERP's Results
This question is related exclusively to few proved spammers who have gained 1st Google search results for specific terms in the Greek market, targeting Greek audience. Why he looks spammer and very suspicious? For instance, the site epipla-sofa.gr, sofa.gr, fasthosting.gr and greekinternetmarketing.com look suspicious regarding their building link activities: 1. suspicious spiky link growth 2. several links from unrelated content (unrelated blog posts forom other markets, paid links, hidden links) 3. excessive amount of suspicious link placements (forum profiles, blog posts, footer and sidebar links) 4. Greek anchor text with the keyword within articles written in foreign languages (total spam) 5. Unnatural anchor text distribution (too many repetitions) So the main question is: Why Google is unable to recognize/trace some of these (or even all) obvious spamming tactics and still these spammy sites as shwon below reside on the 1st Google.gr SERPs. Examples of spam sites according to their link building history: www.greekinternetmarketing.com www.epipla-sofa.gr www.fasthosting.gr www.sofa.gr All their links look very similar. They use probably software to build links, or even hack authority sites and leave hidden links (really dont know how they could do that). Could you please explain or share similar issues? Have you ever found any similar cases in your industry, and how did you tackle it? We would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter. Regards, George
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Clickwisegr0 -
If I were to change the geographic keyword such as "foreclosures in Dallas" on 20 related blogs to "foreclosures in Los Angeles" what would happen?
In other words I'm wondering if someone built up an internet presence for their company through multiple websites over the years and then decided to move to another part of the united states, would it work to change all the keywords to the new location? Would that work toward getting them ranked in the new area or would you have to create entirely new websites? Thanks guys.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whorneff3100