Server problems affect the search engine rankings of

server problems that affect search engine rankings

I recently helped someone solve some problems in the SearchEngineWatch forum, I suddenly thought I should write an article about this issue and other articles. Because sometimes when you encounter a brick wall and don’t understand why your website is not listed or even crawled by search engines, this is not always a website problem.

In fact, sometimes this is a server problem that you may not be able to control. In this case, it doesn’t matter what you do to your website, you just won’t list it. This article introduces some issues that need attention and how to tackle them.

First let me give you an idea of ​​what happened to the people on the forum. His website has been established for a while, in fact he has recently established 3 websites. Two of them were crawled and indexed, and one did not appear in the engine.

Let’s take a look at the common doubts-such as improperly encoded robots.txt, poor navigation, banned domain names, etc., but these are not problems. txt is not a very useful search engine.

So next I checked the WHOIS information, and I found inappropriate information on one website, but in another WHOIS lookup, I didn’t find any information at all. This leads me to believe that the source of the problem may be a host/server problem.

So I contacted the owner of the website and asked him to verify with the web host whether the DNS information was configured correctly. It turns out that this is not the case. Since the website was not correctly resolved through DNS, search engines could not crawl it.

This is just one of many server problems that affect the positioning and ranking of the website in search engines. Although DNS resolution and IP configuration are usually the two most common culprits, there are several other server issues that can harm your search engine rankings and even cause indexing issues.

DNS problem

Let’s take a closer look at what happened to this website: I found that I can connect to the domain name through my browser. In addition, the owner has enough foresight to register his site as the only site on the IP, so I can also connect to the site via IP in the browser.

I can also ping the site and IP and receive the correct results, which indicates that DNS resolution has occurred at least to some extent.

However, when I perform a WHOIS lookup on a different site, I don’t see the results I should get, which means that the DNS of the site is not configured correctly.

I can also use IP addresses to perform these searches. In addition, you can also see how many and what types of sites can be hosted on a domain. This may indicate other issues that may prevent the site from being indexed.

For example, if I did a WHOIS lookup and found a bunch of pornographic or casino sites, I might think (perhaps very correct) that Google has greyed out or blacklisted the IP address because of the website hosted on it. Then, any legitimate site will also be affected by this flag, which will cause engine indexing problems.

but it is not the truth. As I said, it is a single site on a unique IP address.

I told the website owner the DNS information, which showed my concern that the website could not be resolved correctly. A few days later, I found out that one of the hostname servers did have a problem. I don’t know what “proxy” means, but it may indicate that the resolver does not always resolve the site’s IP for some visitors, or that it does not resolve it correctly. In either case, if a search engine encounters this inconsistency, it will exit the site over time.

More problems may affect the ranking of

other issues, nothing to do with DNS, but server-related, may affect the possibility of indexing and ranking. These include improperly configured servers, or overloaded servers.

Server configuration is incorrect

As you read above, the name server is not configured correctly (or failure) can cause problems with the site, but there are other issues also affect server site.

Once the site is resolved through the name server, the request is forwarded to the web server hosting the site. However, if the web server is not properly configured to accept requests, it will reject requests for the site, even if the site exists on the server.

Although this happens rarely, it does happen. For example, if the webmaster types the wrong domain name, or attaches the site to the wrong IP of another server, this can cause problems.

Another incorrectly configured server is a server that rejects requests for domains without “www”. Your web server should be configured to accept all requests for a domain, regardless of whether they have www.

In fact, the ideal situation is that the server automatically sends a “301” server site redirection to any request for a non-www domain, and then forwards the user to the www domain. This is because sometimes search engines treat www and non-www domains as two separate sites. Therefore, link popularity and ranking can be divided between different domain names. In the worst case, one or both of these two domains may be prohibited by search engines from copying content.

In addition, if you are lucky enough to have your own IP address, you should check with your web host to ensure that the IP address resolves to the site. In this way, if a user (or search engine) tries to connect to the site via IP, they will get the correct site service instead of receiving the “page not found” error.

Aliasing problems

described above, it is preferably non www redirect request 301 to domain www. However, for ease of use (and because it is faster and easier to configure), most web hosts will allow all requests for a site to return to that site, so any request for www or non-www domains will return to the same site. As I evaded before, this may result in penalties or bans on the site. At least, the website will not properly spread the visibility of the link, which will ultimately affect its competitive ranking in search engines.

For some servers, the only way to solve this problem is to set up a unique site for each alias and allow non-www alias 301 to access the www domain. Sometimes this requires displaying 2 sites per domain on the web server. Although most web hosts will not agree with this, maybe they can help you come up with a solution that works for you.

Server overload

sometimes, when you perform a WHOIS lookup, you’ll find hundreds of sites hosted on one IP.

Although this is not a problem in many cases, you can still encounter problems in search engines.

This is because, in order to save time, many engines will cache the IP of a domain and only request the domain by IP, instead of requesting a complete DNS request every time they want to index a site.

This means that all other sites hosted on this IP may have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.

This is because every site associated with that IP will be associated with your site by default because of the public IP. If one of the websites has done some spam engine in the past, it is possible that your website may suffer the consequences.

Going back to the example I gave earlier, a legitimate website shares an IP with a pornographic or gambling website. I can almost assure you that legitimate websites will not compete in rankings.

Think this is Lenovo’s guilt. In this case, the association is the sharing of IP addresses.

Although search engines are getting smarter and smarter in recognizing these types of things, there are still some problems. So it is safer to take preventive measures now.

If you do find such a site on your shared IP, you can request to move your site to a new IP at any time so that it will not be affected by the penalty IP.

Another problem of host overload is that sometimes one site (or several sites) takes up a lot of server resources, while other sites will be affected. If this is the case, then your website may not respond in a timely manner, which means that search engine crawlers may stop visiting the website and it will drop from the index.

Again, the solution here is to move to another web server or change the hosting provider completely.

As you can see, there may be many issues beyond the site itself that can affect search engine rankings.

The best way to identify these problems is to become a web detective and use the WHOIS server and PING command to test your site to make sure it correctly resolves to the web host and the IP it should use.

In many cases, when you are sure that there is no problem with the website itself, it is likely to be a hosting problem. In some cases, you may be able to solve these problems quickly, while others will take longer. If you find that it takes too long to solve the hosting problem, can I suggest you buy a new one? One would treat you like a customer instead of a number or paycheck? This way you can ensure that your website gets the attention it deserves and deal with problems quickly