My site was forbidden 7 hour today for all country

Can i expect Recovery if i update my blog regularly as i was doing ?

 

I don't think the server issue has anything to do with your ranking.

 

Don't have duplicate content,,

Yes we are aware of panda and other kind of google update,,,But we have not faced any such problem yet...

Such problem happened when our site was stopped..

We seen many Panda update but still we have not faced such type of problem before...

Now I m confused that why google down our rank ... Due to poor content quality OR due to server problem etc...

Because both things happened same time

 

I checked my G webmaster tool - I can't see any notification from google.. Also i sent them Reconsideration request too..

 

I think you should stop doing this forbidden thing cause though it happened for the first time your Google rank is still at stake so try to solve up the server problem as soon as possible.

 

Then their algorithm just considers your site low quality (you don't get notifications for that).

 

As someone said earlier... if you have trouble with your servers they may do this once in a while...

 

403 forbidden, Do you asking this to your hosting provider?

 

Sorry but I think your wrong. It's all in the headers

When Hosgator suspend web sites they do it wrong, they always have and they probably always will. They basically log into your account and set the chmod permissions of the file they suspect to be causing high CPU usage to 000, this is typically in the index.php file which in the case of a WordPress blog would disable every page of the site. This then prevents you from accessing the file but also has the side effect of causing a 403 Forbidden error on every page.

This is the wrong status code, Hostgator should be implementing a proper method of disabling web sites and issue a 503 error with a retry-after header if applicable. This would indicate to search engines and visitors alike that the problem is likely only temporary and normal service would be resumed at some point in the future.

I expect if he were to look in his GWT account like many have suggested, for that date Googlebot will likely have reported being unable to access several pages with that error code, and that in my opinion is enough for Google to lower the rankings.

Why would they want to continue to send traffic to a web site they know is not responding to requests? It lowers their reputation for serving up such results. It doesn't matter whether it happens every week or once in a blue moon. Correlation may not be causation, but Google is still a reactive search engine.

 

No, you're wrong (in this case). If it [a site] is down for a short period then it's not going to be the cause of a rank drop, which is the issue here. Otherwise, sites would be dropping all the time. However, if it's down for an extended period then of course it will drop (remove from index) until it's available again.

 

Ok then, what would you define a "short period" and an "extended period" ?

Short period = a week?
Extended period = a month?

How would you define them.

 

A good question because with Google you don't always get a straight answer and have to draw your own conclusions (look at their advice for a site move - keep the old site available for 180 days), however I've had several hours downtime before (more than one occasion) and not been de-indexed.

I remember a previous discussion on Google Webmaster forums. The website the webmaster had a problem with was rubbish (a thin-content affiliate site), but Google's answers were good. The site had just come out of two weeks downtime and was de-indexed (not lowered in rank, but de-indexed). What Google employees mentioned:

• A site might be temporarily removed from results if there's downtime, but once it's back up it will be re-indexed (with the same rank).
• Googlebot will keep returning to see if the pages are available any longer. (How often they return can be controlled by specifying an expiry on the server error pages.)

I'd call a short period several hours (not more than 12) and anything outside of that will risk a de-index due to the number of times Googlebot will have re-visited.

The OP's site wasn't de-indexed, just a drop in traffic and (he's not too clear on it) a lower rank. More likely, his site was hit by Panda 3.7.

 

Ah see maybe that's where we are getting confused. I don't think he was de-indexed, I think he was given a -50 penalty or something along those lines whilst Google was getting the 403 error. By losing his top 10 rankings Google saves face by not sending traffic to a potentially dead site that is never coming back, but the bot keeps visiting until it either decides enough is enough and the site is gone or the site comes back at which point the pages are recrawled.

I was going to give a short period anything up to 24 hours, because of time differences. Host could go down in the US, but site owner could be in the UK so wouldn't even notice until the morning, plus time to figure out whats wrong and get fixed. Anything after that would risk de-indexing.

I found a few interesting things when I was looking into this topic further:

Due to hosting problems this guys site was down for an hour in a day over a period of a few days, he lost rankings:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/eCQ0ivb8VPo

This guys rankings tanked after 7 days of him causing a problem when moving server, during which time he installed Cloudflare which resulted in the Googlebot becoming blocked (a 403 error):

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4421176.htm

This guy changed his servers around which caused BadBehaviour to block Googlebot. The problem was found and fixed on the third day, but after three days 2,500 pages from his site were removed from the index and his rankings continued to drop over the next 48 hours. He eventually filed a reconsideration request and whoever dealt with his request saw that it was a genuine mistake and fixed it.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/pD1HTDvaXfw

This guy was slapdash in dealing with a potential threat and inadvertently blocked Googlebot. This is an aged web site where he had held solid rankings for years, within three days of his mistake Google had already started to drop his rankings:

(You have to scroll down to the Oct 5th 2010 articles for the full story)

http://www.webologist.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/google-seo-tips-news-and-updates

Lastly, this video from Matt Cutts deals with the question "How to diagnose a sudden rankings drop"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx04qNrCbnk

One of his first suggestions is to use the "site:" command to check if you have been de-indexed or if it really is a rankings drop. If it returns results for your site, then check to make sure you haven`t blocked Googlebot via the robots.txt

By the way I am not arguing with you, I just find the technical aspects of SEO fascinating especially because of the lack of transparency from Google. It's all pretty irrelevant anyway because the guy who started this thread has got himself banned now so we will probably never find out what happened.

BUT... just so we can all learn something from this I am going to run a little experiment with my web site. I won't reveal the URL until tomorrow to prevent interference but I have a small hobbyist site, it's very niche and very small, only three pages in total. The site was launched in Feb this year and has slowly moved up the rankings in Google.com to rank 4th for it's primary key phrase.

I also won't reveal the key phrase right now, but so that this key phrase is locked in and I can't be accused of faking the results of the experiment I will say that the key phrase has three words, 19 characters plus two spaces.

First Word - 9 characters
Second Word - 5 characters
Third Word - 5 characters

I have been monitoring this ranking pretty much everyday since I launched the web site using Rank Tracker software from SEO PowerSuite (full version). These are the daily rankings since I came back from my holiday:

19th June - 5th
20th June - 5th
21st June - 5th
22nd June - 4th
23rd June - 4th
24th June - 4th
25th June - 4th
26th June - 4th

So right now as I type this at roughly midnight GMT it is ranking 4th. I will put up the graph from the software tomorrow once I figure out how to.

So simple experiment. At 1am GMT I will block Googlebot from my entire domain, I will confirm it's blocked by attempting to submit the sitemap in GWT which should show me the 403 error, then I'll go to bed. At 8am tomorrow when I get up I will check the rankings and then I will remove the block.

So that will replicate the 7 hour downtime the thread starter claimed to have suffered. I'll then post up tomorrows ranking (reveal the domain and keyphrase) and we will see whether or not it had any effect.

 

Well the results are in and it looks like I have proved myself to be wrong in this case.

The website was forbidden with a status 403 for about 8 hours in the end (I overslept) and there was no sudden drop in the rankings. It did drop 1 position however I believe that was natural as one of the other key phrases I monitor gained 1 position. So at the moment the web site is ranking 5th. There were no ranking changes at all in the other search engines.

The key phrase was "chocolate fairy cakes" without the quotes and the web site chocolatefairycakes.com

I also checked in on Google Webmaster Tools and there were no errors or warnings reported. Keeping in mind that it does normally take them a bit of time after the event to show such data.

I will keep my eye on the rankings and GWT to see if any interesting things happen in the next few days, but essentially for this key phrase and site the 403 error had no apparent effect on the rankings. So the issue that the OP's web site had must be down to what ryan_uk suggested in the form of a Panda penalty or some other issue that we don't know about.

Will keep you posted if anything interesting happens.

 

Hi Steph,

An interesting study, although one that is making me hungry (for chocolate cake ). Do you server logs show visits by Googlebot during that time?

I looked at some of the links you provided (admittedly not all, as I've been up since 05:30 and working since 07:00 so it's hard to pay a lot of attention) and the common issue seemed to be the sites went from the index and then returned once the errors were fixed. I think in those threads (and this one) is an issue of terminology often though - rank and de-indexed. They have been used interchangeably, but they are a bit different (at least that's how I see it anyway).

The OP posted on 9 June and the day before was Panda 3.7.

 

Yes Googlebot did visit about 1 hour after the experiment started, it was a single hit on robots.txt which when checking in GWT showed that they were denied access based on that hit.

GWT didn't report any crawl errors or blocked URL's though which was strange. Perhaps it wasn't down long enough to register.

Other than that nothing has changed, the rankings remain stable where they were before the experiment so it must have been down to the Panda update.

So we have learned that short downtime doesn't play any major role in rankings which is good to know.

PS: Make some cakes, especially if you have kids, they love it

 

That is google dance, no problem,you will get once again your keyword ranking .