Server performance and loss of rankings

[carl_daedricdigital]

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

[carl_daedricdigital]

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?

[ThompsonPaul]

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

[carl_daedricdigital]

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.

[JaneCopland]

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.

[carl_daedricdigital]

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

[carl_daedricdigital]

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

[JaneCopland]

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

[carl_daedricdigital]

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