Welcome back rankers. 2 main things today. You may have heard in Australia, about 2 weeks ago now, there was a massive hack on a major hosting company who also happen to be a registrar called DistributeIT. Basically what happened was 4800 websites went off the air. Some of them became completely unrecoverable, others were off the air only temporarily and that had to do with who was backing up and who wasn’t backing up using distributeIT services. A lot of people basically lost their content. What happens in that situation with Google is Google does not want to send it’s users to a site that is down or non-existent or doesn’t work, so what is it going to do? It’s going to demote your ranking. So even if you get that site back up your rankings may still be demoted or maybe there’s things that Google thinks may still be problematic with your site. I wrote a blog post on the weekend which will tell you all about it if you know someone or you were hit yourself by the outage. Basically the main things are this. Make sure you always have another backup of your site in addition to what your hosting company is doing. We used to call this triple redundancy but in the world of cloud and everything else everything has become a bit too easy for a lot companies out there, thinking that someone else is backing up their site. Make sure you back it up yourself. Also if you’re having a lot of outages with your hosting company, change your hosting company. We had a client who we found that once we put our services on their site to watch and monitor their sites up time, we found that every Saturday their site went down for 9 hours and they had no idea. This was bad because obviously, for that 9 hours on Saturday no one could ever get to them and of course, Google when they did come along, saw they weren’t there and therefore it hurt their rankings because Google didn’t want to send it’s users to a site that wan only up half of the time. When we changed their hosting company they jumped up to the front page for their keywords. So, make sure you have a reliable hosting company. If you’re not using an uptime monitoring tool ask your hosting company to provide one or there are plenty of good free ones out there as well, just Google ‘uptime monitoring tool’. It’s really important that your site is always up especially when the Google bot comes to have a look from a ranking perspective.
The other thing you can do if you have still got your domain name running but for whatever reason there’s been some sort of catastrophe and your site has disappeared off the air and you’ve got a bunch of gnomes rebuilding it for you, set up what we call a 503 server response. That tells the rest of the world that this is only a temporary outage and you will be back soon. Your rankings still may drop because Google doesn’t want to send people to a site that’s down but with a 503 response you can also say check back in so many hours, minutes, days whatever it might be. That gives Google an idea that you know this is a temporary outage and the site is coming back up. We’ve seen it happen with really big sites a lot of the time too where they’re doing some sort of merge or they’re creating a new site, they’re moving to a new site and someone in their infinite wisdom decides it’s a good idea to turn off the existing site before the new one launches. Don’t do it, it’s shabby. That’s what the 503 server response code is for so you need to ask your hosting company to set that up for you and then of course when you do get the site back up you stop doing the 503. Above all, make sure that if you are hit with something like this, monitor things in Google Webmaster Tools because Webmaster Tools is going to tell you a bunch of things that you will not find out otherwise. Things like what errors it’s currently seeing, for instance if you go into diagnostics, under Webmaster Tools, and you look for crawl errors, it will tell you a bunch of things it’s seeing and the sorts of responses. The typical one that you will always see in Google Webmaster Tools is 404 if you have them and you need to fix those up because some those may be coming from external linking, from other sites that you don’t know are linking to the wrong page on your site. The quickest and best thing that you can do for your own site is to 301 those 404’s to other URL’s because half the time it’s to hard to tell whoever is linking to you to fix that link. So you just 301 them yourself and you get the link love from that link.
Finally today, Google has announced a new service, which is very very interesting. It’s called Authorship. They announced this the other week and basically you’re going to see this start appearing now for articles is photos of people who wrote the article, in search. This is important because what it tells us is that Google is now going to start putting some sort of value against authorship. This is a new authorship code that they’ve just released. Basically you need to set up a Google profile if you haven’t got one, but it all gets back to this thing that Google’s trying to do. It’s trying to improve content on the web, it’s trying to reward good content on the web. So your authorship value is going to be measured by Google which is very interesting. Basically it works like this, you have a web site, you have a piece of content on that website, that piece of content will then link to what we call an author page which is purely about the author. For instance, I contribute on a couple of different sites and one of the sites is Peter Switzer’s site Grow Your Business for those in Australia who know Peter Switzer and I don’t have an author page on that site, I’m just there with all the other authors. So what I’ll be saying to Peter is ‘Peter, you might just want to set up separate author pages for all those different authors because there’s about 20 experts on that site. The reason that you would do that is so that Google can see that Google can see that this piece of content in here was written by this author and then this author page links to my Google profile page and then I link my profile page back to my author page. This can be done on your own site as well and should be done on your own site. Basically, if I can just get a little bit nerdy for a second, the content page when you’re linking the authors name to the author page it’s using the attribute rel=author and then on the author page when you’re linking to the profile page it uses the attribute rel=me. The profile page will do it automatically if you set up and I’ll just show you quickly a Google profile page, but if you edit your profile when you edit your links (these are all the links of my own Twitter, Digg all the things I subscribe to around the web and where I can be found) if you go to custom link it will give me this option “This page is specifically about me”. If I check that google will add the attribute rel=me. The reason that Google’s doing that and doing this reciprocal linking between author pages and he profile pages is so that people can’t just attribute content to you and you can’t just claim it. If I was to link to this page and say this page is specifically about me I could just be claiming that piece of content so that page therefore has to link back to the profile page. So, there’s this reciprocal linking and this is where reciprocal linking is a good thing to prove that I wrote that piece of content. That’s going to be really important because Google is going to start rewarding authorship.
That is it for today’s show. Let me know how you go with Google authorship and the code and your linking it. If you start to see the results turn up in results because I’d like to have a look at them, I haven’t seen any yet. We’ll see you next week. Bye.
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