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The SEO Tremor Effect

Posted by Michael Martinez on July 30, 2007 in SEO Theory

My personal hosting company moved all of its dedicated servers from one city to another as part of a new “partnership”. As of this writing my personal domains are offline because mine is one of an undisclosed number of servers that are still not responding even to pings on the IP addresses.

I have been through this before. I’ve changed hosting services, had an ISP move computers before, have had my server crash because the hard drive was worn out from all the traffic, and my partner and I have even managed to wipe out our hard drive once or twice (always by accident, usually by doing something that isn’t supposed to affect the hard drive).

Downtimes of 1-2 days are annoying but they are easily recovered from. What is harder to come back from is an extended outage. The longest Xenite.Org has been offline was about a month.

You lose nearly all search visibility in a month.

What brings a vanished site back quickly is strong inbound linkage. The search engines, of course, know about the domain. They’ll continue to visit the root URL and anything else that is linked to forever. But at some point the search engines will start to ignore those non-existing pages and they drop out of the index.

When your pages go, if you have a large content site, other people’s pages can begin to lose traction. Some sites may vanish altogether. Other sites may lose key rankings because they were foolishly or needlessly depending on your links to help them.

The resulting chaos from an extended server outage affects hotlinkers as well, whose pages take longer to render as visitors’ browsers wait for timeouts on the dead server. But what if you’re running a banner network, or pushing out content through Javascript templates.

We do all these things and more at Xenite.

If the outage lasts for very long people will adjust their links. That can actually be a good thing. Sometimes you need to shake the tree a little to get rid of those annoying dead links that point to content that no longer exists. When you come back online your error logs may be a litte bit leaner.

You may also lose some good links but if you know where they are and if you’re the kind of person who agonizes over links you can always contact those sites after your server has been retored and ask then to restore the links. Many people will do that, if they were quick enough to take down the links after a reasonable period of time.

An extended server outage is a good time to see what else shakes loose from the tree. You can look through your content (assuming you have a current backup) and maybe tinker with some placements. You’re already dealing with 0 traffic so there is no longer a business reason not to make a few changes. It will take some time for your traffic to come back to normal.

A server outage of several days may actually provide you with some new links. People may notice you’re down and comment on the event in forums. I suppose where Xenite is concerned this has happened often enough through the years that it has become a non-event. Still, it’s not always a bad thing when your server goes down.

If you were an industry leader your competition will see a temporary rise in traffic. They may believe their SEO campaigns have finally begun to pay off. Instead, when your server comes back online your loyal audience should return to you. That will leave your competitors scratching their heads, thinking that maybe Google did some sort of update and then rolled it back.

The impact your absence has on the Web sites you link, compete with, and rely upon for link support is a measure of the overall value that your site brings to the Internet community. The more flustered people get, the more they value your site.

That kind of social cache cannot be bought, gamed, or faked. It’s something to think about when you design your marketing campaigns. Where do you want to be in other people’s eyes when your server goes down?

If this outage is anything like previous Xenite outages, a lot of people are patiently waiting for our server to come back online, knowing that we’re not really gone for good. Many of them will breathe a collective sigh of relief when they see us in their browsers again.

That’s a good feeling to have. It’s a worthy goal to pursue. It strengthens your search engine optimization efforts in ways a typical SEO campaign structure doesn’t anticipate.