Reliability and SEO

Last year a couple of my friends (and even me personally) made some basic SEO blunders which dramatically affected site rankings. It’s much easier to learn from other people’s mistakes, so benefit from ours!

Mistake number 1. Unreliable Hosting

This problem came when my friends saw their sites almost completely removed from Google’s index. In one case the hosting went down for 2 - 3 days and that’s all it took for nearly all rankings to disappear.

In the other case, the server was configured incorrectly by a developer, which meant Google couldn’t find the site at all for a couple of weeks.

We’ve now set up website monitoring so we’re alerted the moment a site goes down. We’re using www.freewebmonitoring.com – you should too.

It’s taken months for those sites to improve in the rankings, and one in particular is still many positions away from its top 5 position before the trouble started.

Lesson. You get what you pay for. Don’t skimp on your web hosting if search engine rankings are important to your business. If you’re a larger organisation with budget, consider a dedicated hosting server, rather than a shared box. They’re far more reliable.

Remember, Google wants users to have a great experience at its search engine, so if someone clicks on a search result and a “Page not found” error occurs, that’s a poor experience.

Worse still, if the Googlebot gets a “page not found” error on your site, you’ll probably see the search result removed from the index pretty quickly (as my friends did).

Mistake number 2. Forgetting to renew your domain name.

This is one that happened to me! It’s my partner’s website, which when it disappeared from the face of Google, got me in a bit of trouble at home!

Of course I forgot to renew the domain, so when it expired, so did the website.
Once I re-registered, the site was back up and running within hours, but all rankings at Google were lost.

Interestingly, Google seemed to be a little kinder in this instance and quickly returned the site back to its former ranking positions.

The site itself is www.potted.com.au – and it’s kind of an interesting case where the business really only exists in name (and website) only these days, Lib closed the shop a couple of years ago when we started a family.

Way back when Lib first built it, I optimised the site for “indoor plant hire melbourne”, “office plant hire melbourne” and “plant hire melbourne”.

Within a couple of months it ranked first for those three at Google and we used to get a lot of business from that (highly targeted) traffic.

When Lib closed the business, it seemed like such a shame to pull the site down, so, thinking about it for a while, gave a competitor a call. We set up a deal where we would send the enquiry leads through to them in exchange for a commission. I like to think of it as “offline affiliate marketing”.

It’s been a great arrangement for a few years now and continues to provide Lib with modest but helpful income. Provided I remember to renew the domain name every couple of years!

Domains, Mirroring and SEO

Complicated topic this week! Thinking caps on please.

If your business has a global presence, one of the biggest headaches is making sure your website shows up at the search engines in all the countries you operate in. To add to the complexity, it’s often helpful to be shown in the ‘local results’ too!

So what factors do search engines like Google take into account when deciding whether to show a website or not?

Domain Name extension

The biggest ‘give away’ is the extension of your domain name. So, if you own www.results-from-the-uk.co.uk – your website will show up in the United Kingdom for both “the web” and “pages from the UK”, no matter where your website is hosted.



However, your website won’t appear in Australia’s Google with the ‘pages from Australia’ button ticked.

Server Location

Google also looks at where your website is physically hosted. If your domain www.hosted-in-australia.com is hosted in Australia, it will appear in both ‘the web’ and “pages from Australia’ results even though it doesn’t have an .au extension.

That’s why you’ll often see .com’s, .org’s and .net’s showing up in a localized search. However, you’ll NEVER see www.results-from-the-uk.co.uk showing up with the ‘pages from Australia’ button ticked.



What’s the best plan?

If you have lots of domains; i.e

• yourbusiness.com,
• yourbusiness.com.au
• yourbusiness.co.uk

…and you want them to appear locally in each country, then the best plan is to create different websites and host them in each country. You’ll need to ensure your content is not duplicated across all the domains, making sure that everything’s unique, otherwise Google might use its duplicate content filter to remove duplicated pages.

Obviously it’s quite onerous to create dozens of websites all filled with unique content – it’d be better if there was just one website which displayed in all your target countries wouldn’t it! So is there a way to do this?

The answer of course is ‘yes’.

Mirroring a website is perhaps the easiest, where you have a single .com domain – with a single associated website but it’s replicated and hosted locally in all your target nations.

The idea is to sync up the main site to your ‘satellite sites’, so that any updates you make to the main site are automatically mirrored to your local sites. Given that the cost of web hosting has become so cheap, it’s now become an option for small to medium-sized businesses to entertain the idea.

All you need is a credit card for the hosting and an experienced developer for the set-up!