Slow server penalty

Move site to new domain or just wait?

[norwegianguy]

After spending months creating a niche portal with 150+ high-quality articles on the subject, I finally published my site about 2 months ago. First week(s?) serps were great.

Then, all a sudden, the server response on this site was terrible. Timeouts/server hangs large parts of the day. As expected, G realized that my site wasn't usable, and - I guess - it got a "slow server" penalty. Not banned, all 150 articles in serps, but way down compared to the initial ones.

After tweaking the server software, I got rid of the problems, probably caused by crazy robots and/or server attacks. But still no traffic from Google, maybe one or two searchers a day.

I have been looking for answers, and some suggest to move the site to another domain after the problems are fixed. Would that be a good idea?

Or should I just wait. In that case - how long will it take for Google to like me again? Has anyone had a similar problem and waited for the penalty to disappear?

[tedster]

If the server issues are truly fixed, then you probably don't have to move. Google forgives server problems soon after they are clearly fixed.

But also - relize that two months is very young for a site to rank well in Google. You may be in that awkward phase where your good early listings have vanished and now the site needs to establish a healthy profile. There are some good related discussions about this in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.