Website annihilation. So I have a static site on a url that was "retired" by the former owner, yet the site consistently ranked first, second or third on our major search terms. When I bought the company, I never killed the old retired, site, as the "active" site was on all the advertising. I set up a firm to manage uptime on the hosting server, and a few days ago, I noticed the website wasn't appearing in searches anymore. Ughh. A little research showed the server crashed in Feb. The cpanel site server managing company, who's terms of service doesn't allow you to bad mouth them, says they use a different algo to check "availability", and their software says the server was "up". Double ugh. A few minutes to hard reboot the server, fix the errors, and get the site back up, but now it seems after 80 days of being off the air, as if it's gone from google's index. Any ideas if it comes back or not?
I think once the site is up and running it should be OK. If I were you I would definitely run from the company you hired in the 1st place. If you need a better company that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, check this one that i am using myself: platinumservermanagement.com For only $29 a month they will help you with keeping an eye on your server, and also install new software for you on it, or whatever you need.
DoDome I submitted the site using webmaster tools, but I get a big red X. Never saw that before, nothing in the help guides discusses it, and my other 6 sites using the tools are all A ok. I think I'll just freshen up the site a little, fix the links, and ask for a revaluation.
If the dropped just because of server crashed and nothing more than that. ie. change server to another country. Then you should be fine but takes time before Google acknowledge the change since that was a long downtime. That's why I always said website update history is important.
Here is the red X. Been about a week, not sure how to fix it. Google help docs have not been helpful. View attachment 39549
Hey WCGuy, the X means that there are errors in your sitemap, more than likely in the format the URL's are being submitted, have you clicked in to see the errors? Are you writing the urls to the text file yourself?
the sitemap is generated by a sitemap generator that does it's job quite well for all of my other domains. The generator doesn't report a problem, and visually looking at it looks ok too.
hmm, you are right ronancarr. I never clicked on the sitemap link on the far left. I thought it would take me to the sitemap, but instead it takes me to error messages. I'll have to figure out what's going on.
have you tried clicking on the "site name" in sitemaps in webmasters tools to see what errors it reports?