The Google Forum

**Jesper800** · 05-01-2010, 07:59 AM

Hi all,

Since a few days ago, my site has not been appearing in Google anywhere near as well as it did before. My rankings were 4-5 for the keyword "Weersvoorspelling", but not anymore. Now, my site doesn't even rank in the top 500 for that keywod. The site is http://tinyurl.com/2djyboq, by the way.

I have been doing some research, and the crawling statistics in Webmaster Tools have not plumitted, they are the same as usual. Except for a few days ago: Google suddenly crawled about 6 times as many pages as usual.

My site performance hasn't changed either: according to google it's still in the top 4% pages in terms of loading time.

There is one thing that got my attention tho: I checked the W3C Link Checker (http://validator.w3.org/), and my site surprisingly returned:

Quote:

Error: 500 Server closed connection without sending any data back

The strange is tho, that I myself can access my site, and checking my site with another tool (http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers), I get an HTTP/1.1 200 OK code.

My site is valid through the HTML validator from W3C.

Could it be that I myself can read my site just fine, but W3C (and Google perhaps) servers are getting a 500 Internal server error, which might be causing my sudden drop in SERP?

FYI:
- I have not checked the W3C Link checker before the sudden drop in SERP.
- My site is still indexed (using site:[domain])

Thanks in advance and with kind regards,

Jesper

Kind regards,

Jesper

**chrishirst** · 05-01-2010, 08:05 AM

Rankings change all the time. Just stop cheking them it will only lead to more wild goose chases.

**Jesper800** · 05-01-2010, 08:59 AM

My site disappeared from the google results for all my keywords, it didn't drop in the rankings. I know rankings change all the time, but this is more weird than any SERP-change I've ever experienced.

What do you think about the server errors by the way?

**chrishirst** · 05-01-2010, 09:12 AM

Do your site logs show any server errors?

Quote:

My site disappeared from the google results for all my keywords, it didn't drop in the rankings

Google "results" are the "rankings"

If it still appears for a site: search then it's merely one of the vagaries you have to get used to with SEs.

Is the site new?
Is it still getting visitors from SE referrals?

**bbdirect** · 05-01-2010, 04:56 PM

Have you lost lots of backlinks? maybe you have lost lots of backlinks why you are been left behind by your competitors. Try to build links links regularly and much numerous than before.

**Jesper800** · 05-03-2010, 07:05 AM

I've still got all my backlinks, the site is about 6 months old and it's still getting some traffic from google (0-5 per day).

Quote:

Google "results" are the "rankings"

I know they are... What I said was that they didn't drop but my site disappeared from them. Except of course for the people who've got my site favourited through personalized search.

I'm kind of focussing on the server timeouts now: What could be the cause of W3C getting timed out for my site?

**chrishirst** · 05-03-2010, 07:30 AM

No idea without a full error message.
BTW a HTTP 500 error is not a "timeout" it is an "Internal Server" error usually caused by a programming error.

What do your server logs show for the error?

**Jesper800** · 05-04-2010, 05:25 AM

My fault, I mixed them up, first I once got a timeout, but then it said:
"Error: 500 Server closed connection without sending any data back"

The strange thing is that W3C yields that error on my site, but when I visit it myself it doesn't.

The error log on my server is empty.

**chrishirst** · 05-04-2010, 06:58 AM

Maybe the server (or the firewall) blocks the W3c bot?

Does it happen every time you try the validator?
Have you tried WebBug see if that returns any errors?

and if there are no logged errors, it obviously isn't happing on that many occasions.

**chrishirst** · 05-04-2010, 07:12 AM

This may apply
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...tml#post983045
As your page also has a BOM.

HTML Code:

6ca8
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="nl">

Sometimes and by some UAs they are ignored, yet can cause all manner of problems for SEs and browsers (especially the usual suspect)