Recently we asked random users to fill in a feedback survey asking for your opinions on your browsing experience accessing our website.
67% found that perthgazette.co.uk performance was extremely poor and 33% found the speed was average. So today 1st of November 2016, we have now added CDN sever for our media and website content.
So what is a CDN?
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.
You will now notice media and other content will have a different sub domain. If you want to take a look… here is Justin Bieber in a pair of white boxers.
Meanwhile, our website was affected by a 50 hour outage resulting in plenty of 503 errors and this was caused by an isolated incident at GoDaddy. This has recently been fixed. Kudos to Ida, Ken and Steven Aldrich.
Daniel Taylor is a Technical SEO Consultant at SALT Agency in Leeds gives us a thorough step down on what affects this has while sites are down.
In regards to organic search performance (SEO) a website being down for a day, or part of a day, won’t have a negative impact on your rankings. Typically Google crawls a certain number of pages on a website each day (not the whole website) and if it sees that a site is down or a page is unavailable, it can tell whether or not it’s just been removed (causing a 404 status) or had been redirected (a 301 or 302 status code).
The issues start of a page/website is down for a period longer than one day as Google attempts to recrawl the site, it starts to consider users and doesn’t serve the site as high in the rankings, and after an extended period of downtime, the page/website could disappear from the index altogether.
Content Delivery Networks typically only kick in when a websites database returns a 502 status code, but in this instance with GoDaddy, there is no database connection so the CDN can’t do its job. If the issue continues into the next few days, I’d urge Webmasters to keep an eye on their Search Consoles and check for error messages.
However the downtime in my experience over the past 24 hours has been intermittent and on some occasions I’ve managed to load one of my sites, so I’m not sure if this would be classed as a total downtime, or if any of the GoogleBots manage to get through.