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I am very new searchengineworld, in fact very new to web hosting and search engine issues. More on tech support to clients.
Recently my client site which was an averagely popular site disappear from Google index. Did I do something wrong to have cause that or was it because I switched his original site from a hosting company to his LAN now with dynamic ip address. Will that cause problems with search engine crawlers?
If it is the issues on google updating, it has never disappear from Google before. Did I do something wrong?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
KW Ng
I would say that if your client is serious about their website they should really be hosting it from at least a semi-static IP address (self-hosting isn't a problem as long as they understand exactly what this requires of them) as this way they don't really have to worry about people not being able to get to it because of DNS problems/mis-configurations...
Dynamic IP addresses
If the IP rarely changes then it's unlikely to be the problem, but if it changes often then it could lead to a situation where a search engine (such as google) tries to look at the old IP address for the website, finds nothing and so removes it from the index.
If you do a few searches about google and dns cache you'll notice that they have an internal DNS system which "remembers" IP addresses rather than constantly having to resolve them all the time - this can introduce an element of "lag" to their requests so that even if world+dog immediately knows the site has moved google may not.
Availability
Secondly has the website been running all the time or has it had downtime and/or has the client sufferred a loss of network connectivity? If google can't get to the site then they can't index it.
In my mind unless the client has good technical skills then I wouldn't even consider letting them host it - they need to be able to manage the machine hosting their website to keep it patched while ensuring it get's the most uptime otherwise it's a waste of everyone's time. Often clients are better off paying an hosting company to do the machine management side, leaving the client to worry about what makes up the site.
Other stuff
That said it might not be the cause - you also have the rather obvious answer that google couldn't get to the site for some reason - perhaps a bit of the 'net was down or even google's DNS system got messed up (I got dropped because of something similar a while ago).
Everflux - googlebot is currently indexing site (I've seen the 'bot crawling my site over the last few days) lots of weirdness often comes into the results around this time as they build & shift between result-sets.
To get an idea of the cause if you have the google toolbar installed on your machine, then load the site and look at what the pagerank bar looks like...
- Tony
The IP address that the ISP supply is normally very stable and remains the same for several days (don't know if this is constant enough) but it happens on this Monday morning when googlebot happens to come by once and sudden the link disconnects 10 mins later (but only this once for the whole week) and till now end of the week no more visit from googlebot. I know because I will get an email everytime the address change.
But strangely even after that, I can still get search results for my clients'domain until 2 days ago. Now the rank bar is grey. Another mistake I made on my part is to put afew visible but meaningless 2 alphabet links to my own sites which I am very sorry for doing. I really don't know what to do now.
This has never occur before even after switching to dynamic IP for about 1.5 months. The router is set to always on so it will automatically reconnect. My own domain (very new) also disappear from the index after appearing for 1 week.
Thanks again for the advise, as I am just a tech support guy, I don't even know web programming, just basic HTML stuff and really do not wish to give any wrong advise. Other dynamic sites seems to be doing ok except us, wonder why?
Side thought - have you tried the toolbar for both www.domain.com and domain.com just incase they are different.
As I said earlier grey bar generally means you aren't in the current index, however if you are seeing some traffic from the googlebot you might get into the next index (assuming it doesn't think your site has dissappeared again).
Your links and the grey bar are probably not related - generally a white bar means that google has decided it doesn't like you, so for the moment you are sort of in the clear.
Also you mentioned "reconnect" - what type of connection are you/they hosting the site on?
This might also be of interest to you - a little discussion about uptime for hosting. These sorts of guarantees are really what you are paying for when you buy decent hosting - the reality of the situation is quite a contrast to what most people commonly think hosting is about.
[webmasterworld.com...]
- Tony
OK, I wasn't very clear on the situation, sorry. What happen was during the last week of December, I see alot of visits on the sites that I am manning. All these connections are DSL connection, sorry I did clarify. As a sort of fault tolerance in case of link failure, my intentions was to actually run a backup ip updater on my own DSL that will update says every 1-2 days thus if let say their link is down, my updater will update the DNS with my current IP where I will host their site as a sort customer service. That was the initial plan,(I have not implement it) but what you tell me now worries me alot and I probably won't be going that way. (By the way, this scenario won't have any problems on mails.)
Back to google, the crawl at the end period of Dec completed without a hitch ending somewhere in Jan 5 2003 (is it suppose to be this late). Then on Jan 7 2003, a fresh google crawl came, 15 minutes later there was a disconnection on that link and then no more. We still get referer from google until Jan 10 2003, the domain disappear from google without a trace, strange.
It already midnight here, gotta get some sleep. Thanks for the information.
Regards
KW Ng
I just changed a host for a client. 10 days later Googles cache still shows the page from the old DNS.
I leave the site active on old hosts for around 30 days to stop them being dropped from the SE's
So we didn't keep the old site up. It was a drastic move over because the domain was registered by their hosting company, they refuse to transfer the domain control back to my client, so we have to go direct to the registrar and make some noise before we get back control. Things gets really nasty and all his old web pages were deleted from the hosting company's server even before we could react.
Maybe during these period we miss the crawl but it is all for the better, the domain rightfully belongs to the client not anyone else.Hopefully, it will get into the next update and I won't have to be thinking what did I do wrong.
Thanks
KW Ng
