Server Issues which can affect Search Engine Rankings

I was recently helping someone troubleshoot some problems at SearchEngineWatch forums and it struck me that I should write an article about this and other issues. Because sometimes when you run into a brick wall and can not figure out why your site is not getting listed or even crawled in the search engines it is not always a site issue.

In fact, sometimes it is a server issue which you may or may not have control over. In that case, it does not matter what you do to your site, you just aren’t going to get it listed. This article covers some things to look at and how you can go about fixing them.

Let me start by giving you an idea of what happened with the person on the forum. His site had been up for some time, in fact he recently put up 3 sites. Two of which were getting crawled and indexed and one wasn’t showing up in the engines.

We started by looking at the usual suspects – such as improperly coded robots.txt, poor navigation, banned domain and so on, yet none of these were an issue. The site was very search engine friendly, easily navigable and didn’t use a robots.txt file.

So the next thing I checked was the WHOIS information and on one site I found improper information and on another WHOIS lookup I found no information at all. This lead me to believe that perhaps there was a hosting/server problem at the root of the issue.

So I contacted the site owner and got him to verify with the web host that the DNS information was properly configured. It turns out that it wasn’t. Since the site wasn’t properly resolving via DNS it wasn’t getting crawled by the search engines.

This is just one of the many server issues which can affect the positioning and ranking of your site in the search engines. While DNS resolution and IP configuration are generally the two most common culprits there are several other server issues which can harm your search engine ranking and even cause indexing problems.

DNS issues

Let’s take a closer look at what happened with this site: What I found is that I could connect to the domain name through my browser. Further, the owner had enough foresight to register his site as the only site on the IP, so I was also able to connect to the site via IP in the browser.

I could also ping both the site and IP and receive proper results, indicating that at least at some level there was DNS resolution happening.

However, when I went to perform the WHOIS lookup at the different site I wasn’t seen the results I should have, which means the DNS for the site hadn’t been properly configured.

I like to use whois.webhosting.info to perform these lookups as you can also perform IP searches to see if the site resolves properly to the IP. Further, you can also see how many and what types of sites may also be hosted on a domain. This can give an indication of other issues which could cause a site to not be indexed.

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