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Google Rankings Drop! Where to Check Site Response Time?

by Spencer Haws
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello all:

I noticed some of my sites drop significantly for many of the keywords that I rank for in Google. I rank in the top 10 for several keywords (on several different sites) and my traffic came to a screeching halt today. My rankings are down to the 7th or 8th page or lower! After doing some digging around, I decided to login into my Google Webmaster tools. Sure enough I found a warning next the sitemaps for all my affected sites.

The warning was: "Some URLs in the Sitemap have a high response time.
Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page."

My guess is this is the reason for my drop in ranking today. However, I am not sure how to resolve the problem. Could anyone offer some advice? I have not changed the contents of the page or the site for that matter in over 3 months?? (for most of the sites anyways).

I don't see any noticeable slow response time; however, does anyone know of any tools or sites where I can check my response time?

Any other advice to clean up this mess?

Thanks!!
#check #drop #google #rankings #response #site #time
  • Profile picture of the author zapseo
    Originally Posted by keyblast5 View Post

    Hello all:

    I noticed some of my sites drop significantly for many of the keywords that I rank for in Google. I rank in the top 10 for several keywords (on several different sites) and my traffic came to a screeching halt today. My rankings are down to the 7th or 8th page or lower! After doing some digging around, I decided to login into my Google Webmaster tools. Sure enough I found a warning next the sitemaps for all my affected sites.

    The warning was: "Some URLs in the Sitemap have a high response time.
    Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page."

    My guess is this is the reason for my drop in ranking today. However, I am not sure how to resolve the problem. Could anyone offer some advice? I have not changed the contents of the page or the site for that matter in over 3 months?? (for most of the sites anyways).

    I don't see any noticeable slow response time; however, does anyone know of any tools or sites where I can check my response time?

    Any other advice to clean up this mess?

    Thanks!!
    There are a few things I can think of -- however, I suggest that you might want to check into any of a number of google groups that talk about google-type issues. You might get a bit more targeted advice.

    I mean -- it's easy enough to set up a script to check the load times of a page (and, I think one of the firefox extensions -- webdeveloper or firebug -- will also give you some timings).

    You might want to look in your web analytics on your server and see what time the googlebot is coming around and set up something to check the response of your hosting provider at those times (if there's some consistency in the timing, anyway.)

    And, there's also the possibility that there's nothing you can do -- that perhaps, for some reason, googlebot was having trouble accessing your site due to problems in internet connectivity.

    They certainly don't give you much to go on!!! Like -- um -- WHICH URLS specifically? And HOW LONG is a HIGH RESPONSE time?

    Very hard to know!

    Live JoyFully!

    Judy Kettenhofen, Profit Strategist/Copywriter
    NextDay Copy
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  • Profile picture of the author Spencer Haws
    Thanks, I will have to check out some other forums. I am hoping this issue will resolve itself as I never did anything different than I was before; however, it will good to talk with some "experts".

    Thanks!
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  • Profile picture of the author Spencer Haws
    Thanks Don, I will be checking these out right away.
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    • Profile picture of the author Radix
      Originally Posted by keyblast5 View Post

      Thanks Don, I will be checking these out right away.
      Not sure about your sites, but Google looks to be rebuilding it's index of one of mine. In the last hour it corrected a complete drop and restored all of my links in google and it's original PR.
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  • Profile picture of the author vineetmanohar
    Hello Keyblast5,

    I faced a similar problem in the past and I created an easy way to track page response time through Google Analytics (free online tool by google, you probably already have a google analytics account).

    Google analytics has a new api called Events API. It is similar to the pagetracker api but the nice thing about this api is that you can provide a value parameter which is numeric and can be charted.

    The ONLY thing you need to do is to generate a code snippet like this at the bottom of each page:
    Code:
    pageTracker._trackEvent("Response time",  
                               "<sub section name of the website>",  
                               "<%=uri%>",  
                               "<%=request.getAttribute("RESPONSE_TIME")%>");
    You can then go to google analytics and you can chart the response time of every single page with time. If, for example, a set of pages for some reason are very slow at night, you will immediately see a spike on the chart in analytics.

    Note that this only applies to response time as seen by real users, not googlebot or other bots, but it gives you your website characteristic that you are looking for.

    I use java on the server side and explain how to do this with java in my blog post. You can use a similar approach for your server side framework.

    I am unable to post a link at this time due to message board rules but if you are interested you can go to my blog at my full name dot com and search for analytics.
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