When I moved the site to a new web host, I got complete control over the server it was running on. There was a risk that I would mess something up, but I felt that the benefit of having complete control over the environment the site ran in was worth the risk.
Unfortunately, I did mess something up. If you search Google for "running log", Running-Log.com doesn't appear in the results. At all. For the past seven years it was consistently #1 or #2.
It turns out that the web server was reporting an internal server error for a file that search engines depend on, robots.txt. Google stopped indexing the site at this point and after a while just gave up on the site completely. You can see this from this chart of data downloaded from the site (courtesy of Google Webmaster Tools):
I've resolved the issue with robots.txt but I really don't know how long it will take to get the site back into Google's index. Hopefully it will just be a few days. I really doubt that it will be placed back at the top of the search results, but time will tell. In the meantime, if you enjoy using the site and have a blog or website yourself, please consider linking to www.Running-Log.com.
0 comments:
Post a Comment