How Website Downloads Can Affect Your SEO Performance

Last week, several important websites, including Amazon, Spotify and eBay, were spotted by a bug that was triggered by a customer updating their settings. Here on reboot, we shorted the numbers to estimate this blackout could cost Amazon an estimated 32 million in sales but does the blackout also risk tweaking their SERP rankings?

After all, no. Industry giants, such as those suffering from rapid bugs, are unlikely to drop their rankings as they have built trust and authority with Google over the years through high quality content, authentic backlinks and impressive user experience. Not all websites have this digital clutter to withstand technical barriers, so we’re here to explain how website downtime affects SEO performance — and how you can prevent it.

How can GOOGLE tell when an internet site is down?

To index an Internet site and select its rankings, Google uses an Internet site crawler called Googlebot that collects data from anywhere on the web. Also called ‘Spider’, Googlebot explores sites through links, sitemaps and new content search and other methods that will be added to its index. Other search engines have their own website crawlers that behave similarly, however, we currently specialize in Google.

Googlebot will crawl your site regularly to see the brand spreading new content and links, when this is found, it can also be added to the index — but if a link is broken, it will also be considered. There are many ways to determine how often a spider will return to your site, but first, you can watch its revolution to make sure that Google is indexing your site.

If your site Googlebot experiences downtime while trying to crawl it, the bot will encounter an error code, despite being a traditional internet user. And although this creates a negative experience for both the user and the bot, the program crawler will try again when the user finds another site that answers their query. If you are lucky, downtime is negligible and you will find a happier and healthier site when Google crawls it back. But, if Googlebot detects that a site is often down, it eventually gets used to the user experience and if the problem doesn’t come up in time, Google will eventually reflect this in its rankings.

How will Google cross your site?

Obviously, any site downtime is bad and it can cost you in sales or leads. But if that happens, how long will it take for Google to try crawling your site again so that you can avoid any penalties in the rankings? SEO experts in Ahmedabad, India tell you that the exact crawl frequency will depend on the individual site and there is not a single number, but there are many factors that will affect it.

If you’re regularly updating your site with fresh content and optimizing existing pages, this will affect how often it crawls. Google is responsive and needs to provide its users with the simplest and most up-to-date information available, so the index will crawl any new content as soon as possible to keep it up to date.

However, domain authority and recognition also play a very big part. To make it easier for its users, Google will crawl sites that drive a lot of traffic and often offer more compelling content than others. Sites with high quality backlinks are also often preferred by Google, as this shows that they are an authority in their field and so that spider will return to more places.

So, when Googlebot crawled Amazon last week and discovered that it had come down, the difficulties are that it may recognize that this is a site with high quality links and frequently updated content — with a high share of traffic. As the low-domain authority field plumbing site and fewer new pages say, Googlebot will return very quickly to recreate it.

What does this mean for rankings?

Whether you’re an Amazon or a local plumber, the most important thing is that your site is really short. You’ll be lucky and fly offline for just a few minutes, or it will result in more serious problems that take hours, or maybe days, to resolve.

Google is unwilling to predict when a site is going to become a copy, so it will be crawled again from time to time, and when this happens again and again, you will experience a few drops in your rankings. How serious these drops are will entirely depend on how quickly you are ready to catch a second life, and the way Google crawls it again.

The frequency of your downtime will also affect your performance. If for some reason, your site is happening too often, Google will see that it is a terrible experience for the user and you will come in the rankings.

How are you able to monitor your website downtime?

Quickly the issue was found soon and 95% of all sites saw normal performance in 50 minutes. Many sites, including the domain authority, will be protected from this rapid action. But if you’re not paying attention, further delays in getting your site back online can seriously damage your appearance in search listings.

There is a good range of website monitoring tools available that will alert you in real-time if you encounter problems with your site and prevent a lot of stress if your business is running an online business. It is important to try your research when this tool is included, as you will be willing to trust them when you focus on other everyday needs.

Monitoring your site’s speed can also give you a head start if something goes wrong. Site speed may not be a direct cause, but if it is slowing down unexpectedly, this may indicate that a crash is imminent or that there are unsolved server issues. Many monitoring tools will take into account the website’s response time and delay, but you can also manually check through Google’s Page Speed ​​tool.

What’s next

Frustration, there is no hard and fast rule when it involves downtime and therefore its impact on SEO. Matt Cutts, a former senior employee at Google, said that every day of downtime is not likely to have a negative impact on your search rankings. On the contrary, Google engineer John Mueller suggested that downtime fluctuates in the rankings every day. Confused, isn’t it?

As with all SEO, it depends. It depends on the crawl frequency, your domain authority and therefore the length of your time. And like all SEOs, the solution is quality content, top links and a fast site. If you want to keep it as your goal, you need to be prepared to let the website survive the downtime a little, if any, with a ranking loss — if you can catch it fast enough.