Server downtime
Few hosting services are perfect. Server downtime is something most people who have sites on the web have experienced. It is bad. But how bad? How does it affect search engine ranking, which is so important to most of us?
Personally I had a really bad experience recently which made me think a lot about this. For more than two years I had hosted my site ScandinavianBooks on a very low-priced hosting service that only cost me one dollar a month. I created more and more content, added a couple of blogs to the site, and the site had a nice increase in traffic. I was pleased.
Then I started to have problems with my hosting service. The site would go down for all sorts of reasons, I would get in touch with the tech support at the hosting service, they would fix it, and then it would go down again for some other reason. I got lots of support – some good, some not so good – but the problems persisted. Then I went on vacation for a few days to beautiful Portland, and of course the whole thing crashed while I was there. I was basically off-line, but managed to send a message to the tech support. They restored the main site, but, as it turned out, not my blog. So as a result, my blog was down for four days.
When I came home, I immediately moved the site to another hosting service. This service, however, turned out to be fine for my HTML pages but almost a disaster for my WordPress blogs. A blog page could take as much as 10 seconds to load, even after I had spent time speeding it as much as I could!
Restoring Search Engine Ranking?
So off I went again – and moved the site to a new, more expensive hosting solution (where both this blog and the site are now). And now it all works fine and both stability and speed are more than satisfying for me.
However, my stats had suffered enormously during this process, especially at my main blog, Nordic Bookblog. I now had less than 40% of the visitors I had before these “crises”. And, as I have learned, the stats did not improve immediately after the move either.
I have to tell you that I invest a lot of time on my web sites – writing content, implementing solid and fast HTML and CSS, and optimizing my sites for speed and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Given this, the loss of search engine ranking was quite a blow.
It is easy, of course, to understand why. Visitors don’t like to get a 404 page or a 500 page or a blank screen. And if server problems persist and they meet those pages several times, they will eventually stop coming. And Google and the other search engines don’t want to send visitors to sites that are down, so when the bots are unable to crawl a page repeatedly, they block it.
To be more exact: What Google does depends on how long the site is down. Google’s Matt Cutts, in the video below, explains it by asking viewers to look at it from Google’s point of view – you don’t want to keep dead sites in the search results, but you also don’t want to throw out perfectly good websites after a few seconds of downtime. Because there is no real way for the web crawler to know when a website will be back up, it has to try to reach a compromise between the two.
My advice
I have found that the site has been gradually re-indexed, but it has taken me quite a bit of time and effort to achieve this. After 3 weeks I am still more than 30% down from where I was. So the lesson really is quite clear: If you experience server downtime or stability problems, you should jump immediately. Just move to another hosting service without delay. Do not, like me, stay too long with a bad service provider just because you like them or they seemingly are doing their best. If you don’t jump to a better hosting provider, you are likely to pay for it: lost customers, fewer visits, lost inbound links, less income, and so on. My experience indicates that is can be quite costly and requite a lot of effort to catch-up if you don’t jump fast enough.
