Andy Beard - Internet Business Systems Discussion - Latest Comments in 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Edwin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:15:10 -0000

There are other ways, not only 503, for example when your database server is down, it happened to me, fortunately google web crawler did't visit my page that day.

[moderator note: if you are going to drop links that are totally unrelated to context, at least make the effort to format them correctly before I delete them]

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Don — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:07:30 -0000

Andy great to see you back. Your stuff is solid as usual. Thank God I have never ever contemplated using that maintenance plugin. What an absolute disaster. 75 percent of lost search traffic... Yikes

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Taree — Sat, 30 May 2009 18:51:34 -0000

Interesting Andy, did you issue a ('Retry-After: 12345') value along with the 503 to say when to try again or just issue the 503? As i recall from the protocol guidelines, a 503 with no Retry After value defined is treated as a 500 response which is simply "Internal Server Error".

So it may of been 6 days of Internal Server Error, and not "Come Back Later" responses.

I had my site 404 for almost 5 days due to a server collapse, and rankings didn't budge not even for the more competitive stuff.

It will come back, it will be interesting to get a follow-up post of how the recovery progressed.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Charts — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:06:42 -0000

You are absolutely right. I had a site with 27K Alexa ranking, and PR3 page rank, and 5k UV. The site went down with 503 errors and my site was off for 2 days. Once the server was back, my ranking was dropped to 42K and 2K UV and finally the site got 503 errors 3-4 times and now there is no more traffic !

I think to have a good quality host is very very important else all the hard work is in vain due to problems in server.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

affiliateguru — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:48:58 -0000

as per my view and experiment that 503 header is spam for google, it will not redirect the traffic from one domain name to other domain name, becuase considered it spam.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Max — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:01:47 -0000

A friend was running some flash game type sites and had a few days downtime getting the backups going again when the server went kaput. He said it noticably affected his rankings and traffic and took a little while to get it back upto what it was originally.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Andrea Vit — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:43:40 -0000

I used this status code for a short period (2 days) with 503 header "Retry After" without traffic drop.
Here's the official suggestion by Google: http://bit.ly/V5v1o
Thank you for sharing your experience!
Greetings from Italy.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

andreavit (Andrea Vit) — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:32:47 -0000

Andy Beal and status code 503: http://bit.ly/ysArR

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Tatang Sulaeman — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:16:10 -0000

I found when my website was unavailable for a few days people tend to think you've disappears of the face of the earth. unfortunately you get forgotten about too quickly. Having reliable service is a must, downtime for a big site is a major issue.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Beecher Bowers — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:13:15 -0000

Hey, I ran into the same type of problem with Google being blocked from my sites. Evidently my hosting provider picked up their crawler as a denial of service attack or something since it was crawling pages like crazy.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Andrea @ Efficacemente — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:43:44 -0000

I suffered something worst in the last month. My (ex) hosting service didn't return the right headers. Google couldn't reach robots.txt file so... it stopped to crawl my pages!

I quickly disappeared from google... Solution? I had to change my hosting service!

Andrea.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Yura Filimonov — Tue, 26 May 2009 01:12:28 -0000

I often see such signs, when people don't do 301 redirects, when changing permalinks. Your post doesn't say you did.

I have personally observed how 3 days of downtime had significantly reduced the Google traffic (by 80-90%) for two weeks. It cost the business a lot not to renew and switch the hosting ;)

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

suellenhanson (Suellen Hanson) — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:22:43 -0000

503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic http://tinyurl.com/p4tjwn

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

rob_miller99 (rob_miller99) — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:42:30 -0000

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Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

gardengurus (Peter Willington) — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:23:45 -0000

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Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

electronics ipod — Mon, 25 May 2009 18:33:10 -0000

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

marketsnag (Debbie Machen) — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:01:53 -0000

503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic http://tinyurl.com/p4tjwn

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

djdmc (Darrell McCormick) — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:58:35 -0000

503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic http://tinyurl.com/p4tjwn

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

doston (doston) — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:28:08 -0000

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Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

SEOSnack (SEOSnack) — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:56:12 -0000

via @AndyBeard: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic http://tinyurl.com/p4tjwn

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

AndyBeard — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:36:39 -0000

The "kick" of changing permalinks has helped with other problems in the past, on other sites, so I am hoping it will help here.

When I had the 503, the title remained the same as I didn't change it, and search listings didn't change for the period I had the 503 that I noticed, though losing the listings wasn't something I was expecting, so I wasn't looking.

I did notice that the page itself wasn't ranking for terms related to Product Launch Formula, even though in the past, by inserting a large content section on the home page, that had an effect.

The 503 page did rank when I pulled out long-tail phrases directly from the content.

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

Sourav Sharma — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:29:28 -0000

This is going to be the nice experiment to try.

And when you were doing it, did you also notice or looked at Search listing as to what kind title your listing was showing.....???

Srv

Re: 503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

mignews (MIGNEWS) — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:17:41 -0000

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