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
-
Website Redesign & Ensuring Minimal Traffic/Rankings Lost
Hi there, We have undergone a website redesign (mycompany.com) and our site is ready to go live however the new website is built on a different platform so all of our blog pages will not be copied over - to avoid a large web developer expense. So our intention is to then leave all the blog pages as (on the old web design) but move it to the domain blog.mycompany.com with 301 redirects inserted on mycompany.com for each blog post pointing to the corresponding blog.mycompany.com. Is there anything else we should do to ensure minimal traffic/rankings are lost? Thank you so much for your help.
Web Design | | amitbroide0 -
Log-in page ranking but not homepage
Our homepage is outranked by log-in page for "primary keyword" in Google search results; for which actually our homepage was optimised. I have gone through the other answers for the same question here. But I couldn't find them related with our website. We are not over optimised. We have link from top navigation menu of blog to our homepage. Does this causing this?
Web Design | | vtmoz1 -
How would a redesign, content update and URL change affect ranking?
Hi guys, I have a question that I suspect there is no simple true or false answer to, but perhaps someone has done the same thing as we're pondering wether or not to do? We're taking over an existing site that ranks very well on all the important keywords and is obviously very well liked by Google. The site is today hosted on a sub-domain (xxx.domain.com). When taking over, we'll have to redesign the site and recreate most of the content on the site (unique). The site structure, URLs, incoming links etc. will remain exactly the same. Since we are recreating the site, we also have the opportunity to move the site off the sub-domain and on to the main domain (domain.com/xxx - 85/100 Moz rank) and do a 301 Permanent Redirect on all old URLs. Our long-time experience is that content on the main domain, ranks way better than the sub-domain. The big question is wether or not Google will punish us for both changing the content and the location of the site at the same time? Cheers!
Web Design | | mattbs
Matt0 -
Help with error: Not Found The requested URL /java/backlinker.php was not found on this server.
Hi all, We got this error for almost a month now. Until now we were outsourcing the webdesign and optimization, and now we are doing it in house, and the previous company did not gave us all the information we should know. And we've been trying to find this error and fix it with no result. Have you encounter this issue before? Did anyone found or knows a solution? Also would this affect our website in terms of SEO and in general. Would be very grateful to hear from you. Many thanks. Here is what appears on the bottom of the site( www.manvanlondon.co.uk) Not Found The requested URL /java/backlinker.php was not found on this server. <address>Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) Server at 01adserver.com Port 80</address> <address> </address> <address> </address>
Web Design | | monicapopa0 -
The impact of using directories without target keyword on our Rankings
Hello all, I have a question regarding a website I am working on. I’ve read a lot of Q en A’s but couldn’t really find the best answer. For one of our new websites we are thinking about the structure of this website and the corresponding URL-structure. Basically we have a main product (and a few main keywords) which should drive the most traffic to our website, and for which we want to optimize our homepage. Besides those main keywords, we have an enormous base of long-tail keywords from which we would like to generate traffic. This means we want to create a lot of specific pages which are optimized. My main question is the following: We are thinking of two options: Option 1: www.example.com/example-keyword-one Option 2: www.example.com/directory/example-keyword-one With option 1 we will link directly from our homepage to the most important pages (which represent our most important keywords). All the pages with the long tail content will be linked from another section on our website, which is one click away from our homepage (specifically a /solutions page which is linked from the footer). All the pages with long-tail content will have this structure www.example.com/example-keyword-one so the URLs will not contain the directory /solutions With option 2 we will use more subdirectories in our URLs. Specifically, for all the long tail content we would use URLs like this: www.example.com/solutions/example-keyword-one
Web Design | | NielsB
The directories we want to use wouldn't really have added value in terms of SEO, since they don’t represent important keywords. So what is the best way to go? Option 1, straightforward, short URL’s which don’t really represent the linking structure of our website, but only contain important keywords. Or option 2, choose for more directories in our URLs which represent the linking structure of our website, but contain directories which don’t represent important keywords. Would the keyword ‘solutions’ in the directory (which doesn’t really relate to the content on the page) have a negative impact on our rankings for that URL?0 -
Does a loading homepage animation effect rankings?
Our website ( panphoenix dot com) has a Javascript animation when you load it for the first time which takes just over 2 seconds to load. Does having this animation effect rankings negatively? Would appreciate your thoughts!Thanks Rob
Web Design | | roberthseo0 -
Does doubling up on domains increase my ranking?
I own two websites. One is older and contains the bulk of my content. The other is a web-based tool that has less written content, but is equally important to my business. For the sake of examples we'll call the older website "oldsite.com" and new website "newsite.com". Would it benefit my old site to direct traffic to the web-based tool using a domain like "newsite.oldsite.com"? What's the best way to integrate the two sites so I am not splitting my traffic?
Web Design | | Travis-W0 -
Home page is not the highest ranking page?
Our websites do not have the home page as the first page in the search engines. It's something benign like the privacy policy page or the directions page! I've thought of adding no index to the privacy page, but then the directions or contact page would show up instead of the home page. One odd thing I've noticed, is that on our link to the home page on our menu and footer, the link is /default.aspx?mb=rte. But that shouldn't make a difference and default.aspx should rank first, right? What can we do to fix this?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0