What did my hosting company do to me?

Prevented spiders from crawling for a month or more

[FlwrLdy]

My site was in the top SERPS for our keywords but began dropping like a stone in early Dec.. Found out later that month that the hosting company had been preventing all spiders for at least 4-6 weeks (maybe longer) because 'they were slowing down the servers and shoppers were abandoning carts.'

All cached site info was gone from Google. The site has now been reindexed but only 3 of the 12 incoming links are showing, greatly effecting my PR.

How long does it usually take for links to be recognized?

[edited by: Marcia at 3:21 am (utc) on Feb. 20, 2004]

[Marcia]

It takes several weeks to get back to normal when a site slips out of the index, so give it another few. But in the meantime, I think I'd seriously consider changing hosts if that was done without any notice.

[seomike2003]

Sounds like it's time for a new host :)

[edited by: Marcia at 6:45 am (utc) on Feb. 20, 2004]
[edit reason] See stickymail. [/edit]

[Jakpot]

Your hosting company sounds like dingbats

[GoogleGuy]

I'd give it a few weeks. I agree that the ISP sounds pretty unhelpful though.

[FlwrLdy]

Wow! A reply from GoogleGuy on my first post!

Thanks to you all for your replies.

[jady]

As a network admin at a hosting company, I can assure you that Googlebot doesnt tear resources up unless they are runing old/dated machines. We run 2.4's with 2GB of ram and Googlebot is the least of our worries when it comes to resrouces.

It's amazing what people will do out there! DUH!

Best of luck! <psst - get a dedicated IP address while you are changing hosts>

[dwilson]

if Googlebot gets into the shopping cart area & ends up adding items in the SSL area ... then some odd things can happen. I've seen a lot of session timeout errors when that happens.

The solution?

robots.txt. Keep the bots out of the checkout area.

Too bad the OP's host didn't know that.

[edited by: Marcia at 12:32 am (utc) on Feb. 23, 2004]

[outland88]

>Found out later that month that the hosting company had been preventing all spiders for at least 4-6 weeks (maybe longer) because 'they were slowing down the servers and shoppers were abandoning carts.

I really haven't heard of this type of complaint before. Why would they slow down servers? Most reputable hosting services keep downtime to a minumum, which keeps your sites from being dropped by search engines?

Sounds like a friend recommended or you were trying to get by on the cheap to much.

[FlwrLdy]

<Most reputable hosting services keep downtime to a minumum, which keeps your sites from being dropped by search engines?>

That's what I thought, too. (And why I asked here.) I have relied on this company for several years, as have thousands of other busineses similar to mine. We all are in the same boat, unfortuantely. (And they are not cheap.) I just happened to figure it out and call them on it (after doing alot of reading here!) - to which I received the 'slowing down shopping carts' reply.

Needless to say, trust has been substantially eroded. Just hoping to get my links recognized, at this point...

[MedCenter]

One of my clients has a website with hundreds of thousands of pages of content, and Googlebot crawls it regularly... It's on one server.

Basically I don't see how Googlebot could slow your host. It's smart enough to slow up if the response time is long.

I'd drop a ****brick on your hosting company if I were you.

[webwit]

I would definitely look for a different web hosting company if they have to block Googlebot to save bandwidth.

I just moved one of my clients having trouble with his web hosting company, because of timeouts and shopping carts being abandoned. He talked to a tech at that web hosting company and found out there was almost 400 web sites on that server. I moved him to one of my servers with only 20 web sites on it, and his sales picked right up.

Quality web hosting can make a big difference in sales and traffic.