Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
A bit over a week ago however my hosts dns server went down for about 5 hours (fortunately this was during the lowest traffic period). A day later I had 3 mysql tables die which caused 99% of the pages on my site to appear with errors and only minimal content. This unfortunately went unnoticed by myself for almost 3 days.
Almost a week after I fixed the mysql error I got hit with a drop in my search positions for my best terms. Some other terms still rank as they used to, but the result has seen the unique visitors drop from 550 per day to 120 per day.
I've seen this before with this same site when about this time last year I stuffed up my dns settings for an entire day twice in the same week. The result was my rankings came back and went away chopping and changing for about 3 months.
I guess I'm looking for reasurance.. Am I right to make the connection between my technical issues and this drop? What sort of outcome can I expect? Is it fair to say that my previous results should return in a week or a month? Or could my technical problems be a red herring and in fact google has suddenly decided my site isn't as good as it previously thought?
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:44 am (utc) on Oct. 7, 2008]
If you don't know whether there are other issues beyond the technical problems that might be affecting your rankings, it would be hard for any of us to guess. ;)
I guess I was wondering if it is out of the ordinary for a site with a stable position in the results list to suddenly drop given there have been no recent changes to the site itself. For no other reason than google re-ordering the index.
I guess I was wondering if it is out of the ordinary for a site with a stable position in the results list to suddenly drop given there have been no recent changes to the site itself. For no other reason than google re-ordering the index.
Unfortunately, Google has been full of surprises this year, so in that sense I can't reassure you.
Additionally, there are ordinary ongoing factors out of your control which can affect your ranking... things like changes to upstream pages linking to your site, and upstream PageRank changes, as well as changes in the Google algo.
You didn't describe the kind of ranking drop(s) that gave you this traffic drop, so we have nothing to go one with regard to your optimization, but upstream link changes could change how Google views your pages. How many pages dropped in ranking?... for how long?... and how far?
What is out of the ordinary among the things you've mentioned is for a site to have database errors for three days, as well as DNS problems, etc etc. If you have your server logs, check them to see whether Googlebot accessed your site during the SQL downtime.
Hopefully it will all sort itself out like your site gabriel_k and i can rest easy after a couple of weeks or so. Otherwise I guess I have some work to do... Perhaps start with a new hosting provider.. :)
The google positionings came back after approximately 2 weeks. After about 4 days there was a 2 day "hiccup" where it dropped back down again but it bounced straight back. The following week saw the sites biggest 1 day unique visitor count, so traffic has gone back to normal and improved.
My conclusion.. the site experienced a technical issue for at least 2/3 days which effected all internal links and made all internal pages appear the same (20000 or so). during this time the site was crawled a number of times by google which adjusted the search positioning accordingly.
There was also a DNS issue with the site a few days before the above mentioned issue.. however i do not think this was the cause.
