How a 5xx Server Error Can Hurt Your Website’s Rankings

Following more recent Google updates throughout the years, server errors are increasingly detrimental for website rankings. If your website experiences any of these errors, it’s important for webmasters to take care of them before they become even worse issues. 404 page errors might be easily fixed with a custom 404 page or 301 redirect, but a 5xx server error is a different beast. There are two main server errors that people should look out for and fix.

5xx responses, particularly 500 Internal Server Errors and 503 Service Unavailable Errors, become bigger problems for websites in early 2015, as a fresh index came about. If Google comes across a website with a 500 response, the page will immediately stop ranking. However, there have to be multiple instances of 503 responses over a week or two before ranking stops and the page is removed from Google’s index.

Here are a few specific ways Google reacts to server errors and how to avoid these errors altogether, based on experiences that columnist Austin Blais and his team encountered and shared with Search Engine Land.

Intermittent 500 Internal Server Errors

Blais and his team found that one URL had a tendency to return 200 Success responses along with occasional 500 Internal Server Errors. This was because of an instable server, and crawl stats declined as a result. This server instability and the subsequent 500 errors caused the domain to drop in Google rankings.

The developers determined that the cause for the server instability was the implementation of a JavaScript-developed Single Page Application (SPA). As Google attempted to crawl multiple files and/or URLs in the SPA at one time, this could have caused the server to fail occasionally. All in all, the issue caused 2,122 keywords to drop from the top 10 spots in Google rankings and 2,959 dipped from 11-20 spots to below the 20th spot. The changes took place within a week, but everything returned to normal once the server errors stopped.

In the end, this experience revealed the kind of temporary hassle that users of Angular JavaScript SPAs are likely to have, and which is something for which developers need to prepare before implementing.

500 Responses Resulting in Downtime

A specific type of page on the Blais’s team’s domain experienced 500 Internal Server Errors, which caught Google’s eye for around 18 hours. The amount of time each page returned this response is unclear, but the overall impact it had was bad enough.

The drop in keyword rankings was sporadic, resulting in drops of anywhere from five to 100 positions for all 239 tracked keywords. New rankings weren’t as low if Google could find other pages on the domain that were relevant to the search query. Blais’s team used BrightEdge to track the keywords and observe Google’s behavior throughout the 18-hour downtime.

The most interesting thing to note from this experience is that Google actually ranked pages that weren’t exactly what people would search for with certain queries, and Blais’s team couldn’t quite understand that behavior either.

Long Periods of 503 Service Unavailable Responses

Blais’s team of developers found that a domain returned occasional 503 Service Unavailable responses for a period of three months. Once again a JavaScript SPA was responsible, as timeouts occurred when the server couldn’t support multiple requests. Google Search Console (GSC) reported these responses, and about 1,000 keywords fell off of page one in Google when 503 error instances went up from an average of 3,000 to 25,000-30,000.

What the developers learned from this experience was that Google is more likely to punish websites that have 503 errors over a longer stretch of time than those that experience them for shorter periods.

How to Avoid Keyword Ranking Drops Through a 5xx Server Error

While it may take a little while for 503 server errors to result in dropped rankings, 500 Internal Server Errors have an immediate negative effect. Websites should make sure that if they do experience 500 errors, they are able to fix them before Google can have a chance to negatively impact your site. If a 503 response occurs, there’s a better chance of websites avoiding negative ranking impact if they can take care of it before it goes on for too long. Thankfully, it doesn’t take too long for Google to restore website rankings once server issues are resolved.

It appears that there is a fresh index that works on a page-by-page basis, and it is directly associated with a recently released Mobile Algorithm Update. This is good for domains, as it helps to ensure that they don’t completely drop off in Google rankings as long as there are pages relevant to the keyword.

Engineers should consider the overall load that SPAs will be able to support before implementing them. If multiple server-side rewrites are inevitable, server errors may occur. Identifying and correcting a 5xx server error in time can also prevent major negative effects on rankings.

If you want to prevent this fresh index from hurting your website, you should have a team of developers who know how to effectively handle 5xx server errors along with other potential issues. If you can avoid server errors and other common development problems, coupled with good SEO and PPC practices, your website should perform well on Google across the board.

Online Reputation Management and SEO

When everything is going well for a business, reputation management is usually never given much thought. But when a company suddenly slips up somehow, negative publicity can take off like a rocket. Then, everyone will be scrambling for help.

As the SEO pro, you’re likely to get a call. You might not even be an expert in crisis control. After all, it’s a relatively specialized area of internet marketing. But don’t worry. The normal SEO techniques you use every day can help you respond to a PR crisis. Here’s a quick rundown on what to do:

Step One: Identify the Crisis

Trust us, you’ll know a crisis when you see on – especially online where controversy spreads like wildfire. The key here is to identify the source of the crisis as quick as possible. Time is not on your side, so you need to move fast.

You want to identify the first place online where the controversy started. This is probably going to be a social media platform, but it could also be blogs or other pages on your website.

Step Two: Initial Response

Once you find where all the trouble started, you’ll need to respond there first.

If possible, try to apologize or otherwise correct the situation as best you can. Depending on your skillset and relationship with the business, you might simply be posting content they give you or you might be tasked with creating content on their behalf.

Last year, DiGiorno’s Pizza accidentally made a joke using a hashtag related to domestic violence. Their apologetic response came pretty quickly. Even better, they personally apologized to everyone who tweeted a complaint.

Step Three: Create a List of Keywords

You need to figure out what keywords are most closely associated with your negative mentions. Is it the company name alone? The company name and a few other phrases? Something else?

For instance, Amy’s Baking Company is an Arizona restaurant which exploded (metaphorically) in bad press after an appearance on the TV show Kitchen Nightmares. While the keyword phrase “Amy’s Baking Company” was important, much of the content written about the incident also includes the phrase “Kitchen Nightmares.” So that’s a keyword phrase you’d also want to make a note of if you were in charge of reputation management in this situation.

(Note: The real reputation management in the Amy’s Baking Company situation was handled so poorly it’s a case study in what not to do. But that’s another issue entirely.)

Step Four: Identify Any Negative URL’s        

You want to identify any URL’s dedicated to tarnishing the company. These can be specific blog posts or even entire websites. These won’t exist in every situation. If a slight misstep has been made on social media, you probably won’t find an entire website dedicated to it. But, still, it’s always a good idea to check.

Step Five: Optimize Your Social Media Profiles

A company can’t run away from what happened. Let’s take another look at DiGiorno’s. When they responded individually to each Twitter complaint, they weren’t just being nice (although it did seem like a legitimate mistake). They were also helping take control of their bad press.

Every one of their apologetic response contained hashtags associated with their bad press (#boycottdigiorno and so forth). If anyone searched by any of these negative hashtags, they’d see complaints. But they’d also see genuine apologies from DiGiorno’s, too.

Another way to do this is to insert keywords into an apology posted on Facebook and/or your webpage. This can be included as part of a long-form article explaining the situation. Again, this may or may not be content you, as an internet marketer, will actually create.

Step Six: Register Second-Tier Social Profiles

Think of your brand as a pond. Negative complaints are like stones being thrown into the pond. When there are a lot of complaints, the waters become choppy and filled with waves.

Expanding the size of the pond helps reduce the severity of the waves. To do this, you’ll want to register as many second-tier social profiles as possible. Some of these second-tier profiles even have high domain authority. This helps to eventually lower the negative press from the SERP.

Step Seven: Guest Blogging

You want to get your name out there in a positive way. Guest blogging is an effective method of doing so. You can blog about neutral topics related to your industry.

You can also blog about your recent experiences with negative PR. A topic such as “What We Learned During Our Recent Controversy” might be appealing to marketing and PR professionals.  Plus, this topic lets your use those negative keywords in an overall positive way.

Step Eight: Go to Step One

Well, not really. But cleaning up a damaged reputation won’t happen overnight. You’ll need to regularly monitor the web for more negative attention and negative keywords. You’ll also want to continue to create positive content associated with your brand. This, along with time, will help push the negative info further and further down.

Keeping Your Reputation Clean

Of course, not having a PR problem in the first place is always the best course of action. There will always be a few complaints here and there. This is the internet, after all. But you want to do all you can to prevent future blunders originating from the company itself.

Obviously, this part is all more for the business owner than the SEO pro. But you might be in a position to help advise a company. Here’s what to tell them:

·         Claim your company name on every possible social media name. This prevents someone else from taking over.

·         Create multimedia content with a positive brand message. Search engines give a high ranking to YouTube and Google images.

·         Be careful what you post. Social media mishaps are one of the most common sources of bad PR. Make sure the person in charge of your social media platforms is an experienced professional.

Online Reputation Management and You

You might spend 99% of your time doing traditional internet marketing. But you still need to be prepared for the rare time when a client contacts you in a panic. By following the tips above you can help mitigate and repair the damage. Even though a PR blunder isn’t ideal, it can be managed with the right moves. 

SEO Around the World: Creating International Websites

If you’ve ever watched Last Week Tonight with John Oliver you probably know about his reoccurring bit where he mislabels a foreign country only to point out how nobody has noticed the error. For me, this is one of those “it’s funny because it’s true” type of situations. I’m terrible when it comes to foreign geography.

This wasn’t much of a problem professionally until I was hired by a client who wanted a website targeted to Germany. Sure, I’ve heard of Germany. But I didn’t know how to market towards the average German.

Should the content be in German? Or is English okay? How is a site in Germany different from one in America? I had no clue.

Over the years, I’ve taken on more and more international clients. This was never part of my business plan, but once I successfully completed the German site more international orders started coming in. Even though international sites seemed complicated at first, I ended up learning the right way to approach them – no matter how little I knew about the foreign country involved. 

Here are some tips and tricks I’ve learned about internet marketing and international websites:

Determine the Type of Targeting

The business must decide what type of targeting they want. There are two major types: country and language. There are specific reasons to use each.

Country:

This is the ideal localization. This does require enough potential users and search volume to justify. Typically, this happens with large companies who already have an established customer base.

Language:

When Country isn’t the best choice, you should go with language. This doesn’t mean Language is the second choice. Rather, Language is often the best choice for a business in certain situations:

1) When location doesn’t have a high importance. This could be a virtual business where you’re not providing a physical product or service. Some examples would be a technology, business or content creation company.

Two large examples of businesses which use language targeting are Skype and Atlassian.

2) When your potential customer base is of an uncertain size. If you start with language localization you can then watch growth trends for an area. Once certain levels of traffic and conversion are reached, you can then move into country localization with greater confidence.

Measure Your Performance in Relevant Markets

Your web structure could change based on a variety of factors including authority level, traffic and current rankings. If your client has an existing web presence in the country (or a similar country) this is a great place to start analyzing. Try to determine the following:

·         The current web structure

·         The current search visibility, traffic and conversion rate

·         The overall success of the existing site

Analyze the Popularity of the Top Sites in Your Targeted Market

Find your competition in the market and take a look at what they’re doing. First, you’ll want to identify and analyze their web structure. Then you’ll want to take a look at their link profiles.

Their overall popularity at a domain and page level is important to know. So is the percentage of links which come from local sites. To do this, compare local ccTLDs and IPs to gTLDs.

Determine the Influence of Local vs. Generic Domains

If you’re not starting from scratch, you’ll hopefully have access to search visibility and traffic data. You can use this data to analyze cultural factors and preferences of your international audience. This data alone is simply a starting point, so take it with a grain of proverbial salt.

An international site’s performance will also be affected by:

·         The visibility and authority of your brand locally

·         The frequency of mobile verses desktop search

·         The number of ads for the brand

·         The general organization of SERPS for the niche

Communication with an International Client

I found this tricky at first. My contact for the business spoke perfect English, but he’d never been to America. This definitely presented some challenges.

Turns out, normal shorthand for design and structure are a bit dependent on a common culture. I found an effective way around this, however. I had my client pick two types of samples. I asked them to find:

·         Examples of websites which sold a similar product or service. These are websites where my client liked how their competitors did business. These were functionality samples.

·         Examples of websites which we’re aesthetically pleasing. The products or services sold on these sites were irrelevant. These were design samples.

This helped me get a pretty good idea of what my client wanted. As with any client, there was a bit of back and forth until we settled on an overall look. But the initial examples provided a great common ground to start from.

Keywords in a Foreign Language

I’m not going to lie. Analyzing and selecting keyword phrases in a foreign language can be a bit rough. Now, no company is going to hire a non-native speaker to write their content. But you might be called upon to create a few keyword phrases.

You can still use the same process you’d normally use to find keywords. Google translate can give you an idea of what those words mean, too. This is about the best you can do. Your client should hopefully help you from there, acting as a liaison between you and the content creator.

Around the World

The internet has made the world smaller. International business is easier than ever before. Even if you’re not an expert in foreign countries (and I’m certainly not claiming to be one, either) you can still provide your internet marketing services to companies around the world.

Sure, there might some language and cultural hiccups now and again. But for the most part SEO skills are universal. With these tips and tricks, you can expand your base of potential customers by leaps and bounds. 

10 Best Ways to Website Promotion using SEO, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media

10 Best Methods to Promote a Website successfully using Free+Paid Ways of Marketing and Advertising

Website Promotion ideas, techniques, Tools, Tips: 10 ways to successfully Promote and Market a Website

Website Promotion using various effective Tips for Marketing, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, Content Promotion, Free Submission, Blogging Tools, etc.



With the number of host names hitting the 861,379,000 mark as of January 2014, there is no doubt that having a website is no longer a problem these days. The real issue is promoting it. Businesses running websites and blogs face the challenge of having people to visit their sites and make sales. 


To Promote a website successfully it takes a lot of good ideas, techniques, ways, methods,Tools, SEO processes, submissions, etc. Sometime, you may even have to depend on paid methods where you have to pay something to increase traffic and overall visibility of your website over the desired geographical locations of your choice.

Though, some traffic generating methods have edge over the others. You have to consciously choose what suits best to your web property! 


Social Media, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Video advertising, and email advertising are undoubtedly the top methods to get huge traffic (referral + organic) for your website or blog! 


[ Here are a few tips that businesses can use to promote their websites ]

Website Promotion Methods: Best Ways Promoting a Site using Means of Advertising Marketing SEO, etc

10 best Methods to Promote your Website on the Internet:

First of all, submit your website to the maximum possible search engines as they are the ones that send free organic traffic to your website if it is well indexed in every major search engines. 



[ List of Free search engines to add url of your website ]

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

The most important and successful method of promoting and marketing a website is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Most people look for website urls by searching the keywords on search engines. 


A website that has a low SEO ranking is therefore not as visible as one that appears on the first page of the Search Engine Results Pages. 


There are two ways of optimizing your website for search engines: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. 


On-page SEO refers to the methods that are applied online, on the website itself. They include editing the existing website content, linking and back linking, social media sharing, and blogging, to name but a few. 


Apart from these, landing page optimization is very important as per the on-page SEO guidelines in order to rank a website well in search engines. Landing pages are counted in ranking factors decided by major search engines. 


Another crucial aspect is website loading time. You must have heard too frequently about this parameter from medium bloggers to expert ones. 



Now, website speed is counted in a list of confirmed factors that affect SEO for a web page.


So  try these tips and tools for optimizing the loading time of your website   




Off-page SEO on the other hand refers to the SEO methods that are applied outside the website, such as word of mouth promotion and advertising on the print media among other methods.



You can even outsource your SEO work to the freelancers available on Gig based websites, like Upwork.com, freelancer.com, etc. 


--->  Get the list of 10 best websites to buy SEO Gigs


Use a powerful SEO software, like this one here - it will help you review your website as per the best practices for on-page and off-page SEO rules. 

2. Blogging and article marketing

Blogs have become very popular in disseminating information online. Most websites have a blog in which information on the various services offered on the site is provided. 



Offering original content for free helps sets you apart from cutthroat competition. You can so write for other blogs and request other blogs to write for you and share links. This is called guest blogging. 


It gives you an opportunity to get other customers from different niches and geographical locations. Article marketing has also become one of the greatest content marketing tools that have become very popular in the recent internet marketing scene.




[ List of 30 best blogging sites to promote your website free ]




[20 Free/paid High PR directories to submit your website] 

3. Pay per click (PPC)

Some website marketing ways are free while others are paid. Pay Per Click is an example of a paid advertising method. PPC entails using internet advertising to generate traffic from search engines like Google. 



Google AdWords and Google AdSense are the most popular PPC techniques that are in use today. In these platforms, you pay a fixed price for each click your ad gets. Your hope is that the click will result into a sale. 


Your main task here is to look for keyword phases that will attract rather than distract the audience.

4. Video advertising

YouTube is a leading video sharing platform that has provided businesses with a simple way of sharing video clips online. You can embed videos on your website or social media page if you want to clarify or demonstrate the use of a new product. 



Going viral is the most desirable result but if it doesn’t happen, a video will still drive traffic to your site if you use strong call to actions. Keeping in mind that YouTube gets about 1 billion visits every month and that 1/3 of online activity is spend watching videos, you have no reason to ignore YouTube, after all, it is the second largest search engine.




[ 10 Best Video submission websites where you can promote your website ] 

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is a great website promotion tool that allows website owners to reach out to their esteemed customers in a very personal way. 



There are several email marketing companies that help you to create mailing lists after which you can start your email marketing campaign. If you would like to succeed in email marketing, you need to start creating your mailing list straight from day one.

6. Word of mouth

When you are looking for some goods or services, you normally ask your friends for referrals. Promotion of some businesses such as makeup, women beauty and fashion businesses are better done through word of mouth. 



As a website owner, you need to build connections with your fans and friends so that you can get positive reviews on your website and word of mouth recommendations.

[ 10 best tools that are used by SMBs and SMEs for marketing a website ]

7. Social media Marketing

Social media helps webmasters and blog owners to reach their potential clients. People are on social networks to socialize, but as you socialize with your friends, you can always encourage them to buy form your website. 



If you have created a page for your website, you can encourage your friends to like it. There are many organizations who have a very strong following on social media and the fans of their pages more often than not become their customers. 



People also tend to be outspoken on social media, so it is easy for you to get customer feedback and know what people expect from you. Facebook Ads can also be used to further bolster the chances of getting new customers. 


LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Quora and Twitter are others social networks that can help to promote your business.


[ 21 Finest Methods to generate traffic for website using SMM, SEM, and SEO ]

8. Public Relations

Public relation strategies are very essential in promoting and marketing a website. It is through public relations that you are able to brand yourself and convince people that you are an expert in your business. 



People become aware of your brand, and conversion rates escalate. For example, writing journalistic articles for magazines and newspapers is a way of connecting with the people, especially those who read the magazines or newspapers. 



Being mentioned by a trusted media center is a big plus, as people tend to trust you more.

9. Listing your Website

Getting listed on search engines and business directories is one of the marketing tips that some business owners tend to ignore. Business directories have a way of connecting businesses to their customers in a way that other platforms cannot. 



For instance, if you list your business’s physical address on Google My Business, customers can get directions to your registered offices through Google Maps. Bing places for Businesses and Yahoo localworks are great areas to list your business too. 




Others are Yelp, TripAdvisor, Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Angie’s List, Manta, DexKnows, BBB and Merchant Circle.

10. Press Release distribution (PR Submission) 

No one can underestimate the importance of press release distribution in marketing a website. A press release is an easy way of creating promotional content and distributing it to your current and prospective buyers. 



You can come up with a regular schedule of sending press releases, such as once a month or once in a fortnight. If you can contact local medial like magazines and newspapers topublish your press release the better for you.