Issue with Hosting - Drop in Traffic

Discussion in 'Web Hosting' started by blogreview, Apr 18, 2013.

  1. #1
    Did somebody face with a drop in organic traffic (Google, Bing, etc) after problems with hosting company (unexpected shutdown, some problems with server). When this happened the first time, I did not pay attention to it, and search for the cause of something else. But after the second time (unexpected shutdown or any problems in hosting again) traffic drops again, already suspicious. If you are faced with this problem, or know the solution to resolve it, can You please share?
    I have a simple blog on WordPress. Many of my articles are located on the first pages and the top places in Google search. Position after that did not fall, all at the same locations. Articles, links added regularly. For my part, nothing has changed, I do what I did before. Any help would be appreciated.
     
    blogreview, Apr 18, 2013 IP
  2. Maestroc

    Maestroc Well-Known Member

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    #2
    Google has said that a hosting provider's reputation does not affect your placement in the rankings except in serious cases where they might find that of the 500 sites hosted on a server (for example) 490 of them are scam sites or other poor content/dangerous sites. Google's Matt Cutts made a video about it:



    I think it more likely that if you are seeing a traffic drop with no change in content then it is one of a few possibilities:

    1) You got bit by a Panda update that just happened to correspond to your server moves in some general period of time.
    2) There is a problem with your new host and it is shutting down more often than you are aware of. (if so, drop me a PM and maybe I can help).
    3) Something else has changed when you moved your site. Go in and check your 404 logs and see if you are getting lots of bad page requests. If so then something in your Wordpress move did not copy correctly or you have set things up differently on your new server. Maybe a tweak to your htaccess file or to some other setting that is changing your URL's. If you browse your site live the links will all work, but maybe those are not the links that the search engines have stored in their crawl stats. If you have access to Google Webmaster Tools for the site go in there and see if you are getting any warnings.

    My bet would be that it is number three. Good luck!
     
    Maestroc, Apr 18, 2013 IP
  3. blogreview

    blogreview Member

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    #3
    Thank You Maestroc.
    I do have Webmaster , and I'll start with it tomorrow.
    Will see how things going.
    Thank You.
     
    blogreview, Apr 18, 2013 IP
  4. blogreview

    blogreview Member

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    #4
    around 60 bad URL's ( 404 ). Trying to fix
     
    blogreview, Apr 19, 2013 IP
  5. blogreview

    blogreview Member

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    #5
    Most of them from other sites. Nothing I can do!! Or there is some way to fix it??
    And i don't think that was the main issue.
     
    blogreview, Apr 25, 2013 IP
  6. q7m

    q7m Well-Known Member

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    #6
    As I know, the position in search engines is influenced by the loading time of your site pages. The unexpected shutdown should'n influence the SERPs if it doesn't happen too often, but the average response time is important in the search engines algorithms.
     
    q7m, Apr 25, 2013 IP
  7. Maestroc

    Maestroc Well-Known Member

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    #7
    It might not be, but without seeing the site or knowing more about it it is hard to do much more than guess. Q7m is also correct that the speed of your site can be an issue too. If you think that might be the problem try using a web based site loading speed checking tool. There are some that will compare the load speed of your site from various places around the world.

    By the way, if you mean that the broken URLs are incoming links coming to your site from other sites then you can add entries to your .htaccess file to 301 redirect the bad URL's to the correct ones on your site.


    If you mean that the broken URLs are on your pages and are pointing to 404 pages on other sites then you should probably either try to fix those links on your site or remove them entirely.

    Another thing to consider on webmaster tools would be to check out some of the other analytics functions of it. Like look at your incoming search keywords and see if you can tell what keywords you have lost the traffic for. Also look at the other Tools options to see what errors your site is displaying other than the 404 pages.
     
    Maestroc, Apr 25, 2013 IP
  8. blogreview

    blogreview Member

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    #8

    Thank you for interesting. I did test this morning with tools.pingdom.com for one of my page:
    Page size - 1.0 MB
    Requests - 98
    Load time - 1.37 s
    What do you think - is it good enough?
     
    blogreview, Apr 26, 2013 IP
  9. blogreview

    blogreview Member

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    #9
    Most broken URLs are incoming links coming to my site from other sites and I would do changes to .htaccess file. I'm going to do Analytic check today.
     
    blogreview, Apr 26, 2013 IP
  10. q7m

    q7m Well-Known Member

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    #10
    I recommend you the PageSpeed tool from Google
    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

    Enter the address of your site and see the results. If your server has a long response time, you must see something like "improve server response time" in the "Suggestion Summary" section.

    Edit: What host are you using?
     
    q7m, Apr 26, 2013 IP
  11. dumindushalika

    dumindushalika Notable Member

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    #11
    You must use a web host which has almost 100% uptime and latest technologies such as greater port speed etc. It will help you to get a good page load speed which directly effect on the SERPs.
    Also there may be other issues for your drop. Just check them via Google web master tools.
     
    dumindushalika, Apr 28, 2013 IP