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Would a 500 Internal Error cause my site to disappear from the SERPS?

by aprilm
5 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello,

This is an SEO question. Last week, my site was down due to a 500 Internal Error. (I think a plug in I use may be causing this to happen as this has happened once before) I have no idea how long my site was down, it could have been an entire day and I didn't know it.

I was ranking at about #5 for my keyword, and now I am just gone. (actually, I am at 507 according to Market Samuri's rank checker)

Does this sound like it could be the reason for my deranking? I haven't changed my home page at all in over a month.

Thanks.
#500 #disappear #error #internal #serps #site
  • Profile picture of the author Zeb
    It could. It happened to me once. Good news is that once my site went back up, the rankings came back. Didn't take too long to get my rankings back.
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    • Profile picture of the author aprilm
      Well that's good news. I don't know if this is what happened or not. Just out of the blue, I have disappeared. If this is what happened, would the error show when checking google's cache of my website?
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      • Profile picture of the author paulgl
        Nothing to worry about. Happens to the best of websites.
        All it means is google will try and crawl again.

        If you have a trusted or even semi-trusted site, it would take
        a very long time for google to get serious about it.

        Servers take dives and have issues all the time. Most are fixed in
        the blink of an eye. Some take longer. If you are on a first name
        basis with your web host, the better.

        Paul
        Signature

        If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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  • Profile picture of the author ~kev~
    How old is the site? For a new site, yes, being down could knock you back in the rankings.

    For a old, mature site with lots of backlinks, being down for 24 hours should not be a problem. I know of one forum that was off-line for almost 2 months and still had 800,000 pages indexed with google. During a server move, my forum and blog were off line for about 36 - 48 hours, and they did not lose their rankings. But those sites are several years old and have lots of backlinks.

    Now that the site is back up and running, it should recover its ranking pretty quick.
    Signature
    Country Lifestyle Network
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    • Profile picture of the author aprilm
      thanks guys. my site is only a few months old. I first started working on it in March. Since then, it took a nosedive in the SERPS once before because I had changed my homepage. But then it came back and was ranked a bit higher than before. This time I didn't do anything at all except experience that 500 Internal Server Error problem.

      I read on a thread in another forum about someone who had the same experience as me, and the way he found out was because he clicked on 'cache' in his results listing and it showed the 500 internal server error as the last time Google had viewed his page. I decided to try that with my site, but the cached page showed my page correctly.

      So, does that mean I could have been deranked for some other reason other than the error?

      (hope all that made sense)
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