Restoring a site that was down for two months
Date: January 23, 2014Category: Author: David Hall
There was a situation where someone had neglected to renew a domain name registration, and before he noticed it, the domain name had gone on the open market and he had to bid to get it back. As a result, the website was down for two months. He feels that this has caused long-term damage to its Google rankings. We’re skeptical about that. In his case, someone had totally revamped the site when it was re-launched, which muddied the issue so much that it was impossible to say whether the damage to the site had been caused by the SEO revisions or the site being down.
To find an answer, we decided to pose the question in our monthly Mastermind group, a online meeting sponsored by Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News. SEO consultant Casey Markee answered that he thought a site would recover in a couple of weeks. When we went back to him later with follow-up questions, however, he began to hedge on that and speculate that there could possibly have been some long-term damage to the site’s reputation from its being down.
When we researched online, we couldn’t find anything definitive. So we decided to conduct a study of our own. And here are the preliminary results and an analysis of those results. It appears that a website restoration, that is, restoring the traffic of a site, takes only a few days. Here is an explanation of what we did:
The site is America’s Dental Bookstore. This site used to make hundreds of dollars a month, but has been downgraded with Google’s recent algorithm changes, because it sells books only as an Amazon affiliate. In October, it only made $29. So we were willing to sacrifice it for two months to get an answer to this question.
I took the site down late on October 31, 2013. I took it down by redirecting the DNS pointers to a different location. Then, early in the morning of January 1, I put it back up.
In October, the site averaged 157 visits a month. On January 1, the site got 112 visits. On January 4, it hit 157. On January 5, a Sunday, it was 109 visits. From January 6 to date it has averaged 224 visits per day, an increase of over 42% over October.
Here’s what we did to accomplish this website recovery. As soon as I re-launched the site on January 1, I installed a WordPress blog. It didn’t have a blog before. (The situation reported in the opening paragraph was of a website that also didn’t have a blog). I did one post immediately and we have written five more quality blog posts since then. Nothing else was done. No extra links were placed and nothing else was done to promote the site. What a WordPress blog does is that with every post it sends out a ping to all the major blog indexes, letting them know that something new has been published. This got Google to quickly recognize that the site was back up.
Rankings of the site clearly suffered over the short term. While Google re-indexed the site almost immediately, a search on the brand name, “America’s Dental Bookstore,” showed that the site was ranking fourth for its own brand name, an indication that its rankings were being penalized. After a week, however, that ranking moved up to #1.
The patterns of traffic have been a little different after the website restoration from what they were in October. In October, 64% of the search-engine-driven traffic was from Google. January 1-7, only 37% of search-engine-driven traffic was from Google. From Jan 8-13, 61% was from Google. Jan 14-17, 48% was from Google. Jan 18-21, 63% was from Google. So it appears that Google is a little slower to respond than other search engines and was imposing a downgrade on the sites rankings. But I feel confident that the site’s reputation is now fully restored in Google’s eyes. Traffic has certainly fully recovered, and more.
Entrance pages from October and after the site recovery are similar. Only about 10% of the traffic, interestingly, is coming through the blog. So even discounting the traffic directly attributable to the blog, the website traffic since January 5 is up 28% over October. And the key entrance pages before and after the website restoration are the same.
How about the revenue from the site? It surprised me to learn that it is up significantly. In October, the site earned $29.44. So far, January 1-22, it has earned $56.10. The average monthly earnings for Jan-Oct 2013 were $42.39. If earnings for the last week in January continue at the same pace, January earnings will be up 86% over the average performance for the ten months before it was taken down.
Bottom line: If a website goes down for whatever reason, traffic should be able to be restored in about a week, if the recovery is done properly.
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