Moreover, with Google’s super fresh index (be it Caffeine or some other update), these pesky server errors can now negatively impact your site rankings faster than ever before. For this reason, although server downtime is a periodical necessity for the implementation of fixes and updates, those downtimes should be both limited and handled properly. You can achieve this by contacting established SEO companies in Belfast that specialise in handling these issues.
According to a panel of expert Webmasters, in early 2015, the negative effects of Google’s fresh index on keyword rankings began to emerge. Of specific concern to website owners were “Internal Server Errors (expressed as code 500)” and “Service Unavailable Errors (expressed as code 503).” When the former errors (500) were encountered, for example, a given website could immediately drop from the rankings. The latter error response (503) did not seem to immediately impact rankings, however, when that message was consistently returned, the results could range from a drop in the rankings to a website (or a page of that website) potentially being de-indexed by the search engine. If you are experiencing either of these two error messages, it is highly recommended that you reach out to a SEO company in Belfast that has the knowledge and expertise to resolve the issue without further delay.
Google’s index and rankings are now updated so frequently that practically any 500-Error message could potentially impact a website’s position because it reduces the crawling of that website by the Google bots. While it is unclear how long Google’s fresh new index has been around, Google did, in the Autumn of 2014, comment on a new “crawl” budget and how crawls would be throttled in the face of server errors. This announcement may have served as a precursor for things to come.
While the SEO companies in Belfast (and elsewhere) have yet to uncover a specific label for it, they do know that Google has indeed adopted a fresh index—one that not only causes server errors to damage a site’s rankings over time, but now also rapidly, on a page-by-page basis.
For more information on how server errors can quickly and negatively impact your site rankings, please reach out to us at WSI Digital Web. Our dedicated team of experts has years of collective experience with regard to SEO in Belfast—experience that can keep your website up and running smoothly.