What to Do When Your Site Stops Responding and Loses Rank in Search Results

Any web resource, for various reasons, can become unavailable to users at some point. And if it happens that the site stops responding to user requests, its web pages disappear from search results.

It raises the question – is it possible to stop this process and save the pages and the entire site? Today we’ll reveal this topic and explain why a site might go offline, how a web resource’s rank can change, and how to avoid losing it.

Why the Resource Doesn’t Respond

Let’s list the most common reasons why a site becomes unavailable:

• The resource has been hacked by attackers hired by competitors.
• Issues arose at the hosting level.
• The site has technical problems.

Hacker Attacks

This is quite a frequent cause of site issues. To achieve such a result, numerous requests are sent to the web resource. If the site is hosted on a standard hosting service, it will surely not withstand such an attack, and even the provider will not be able to help you.

The attack on the resource is conducted to make it unavailable and lose ranking. The executor gets paid for their work, and this is relatively inexpensive. Usually, payment is made for the duration of the attack. Hackers get about $5 per hour of work, and if the web resource has additional protection, you will have to pay more than $400 per day.

Any site engaged in business can be subjected to such attacks. This leads to positions significantly dropping in search results, and the business suffers losses as new customers do not visit the pages.

Hosting Level Issues

Such a problem is also not uncommon. For example, about a year ago, there was a fire in the building of a major hosting provider. As a result, about 10% of Ukrainian sites faced difficulties.

In such a situation, you can restore a web resource if you have backups. But if that happens and you don’t have any, you can use data from archives to restore. If these methods are not relevant for you, you will have to create a new site.

Does a Non-Responding Site Lose Its Rank

In case, for any reason, the search engine stops seeing the site, it is immediately excluded from search results. Accordingly, if one site disappears from the results, another can rise. This is beneficial for competitors.

If nothing is done about this, the site might never regain its previous position. Therefore, it is necessary to use ways to avoid losing rank and preserve the pages if the problem has already occurred.

How to Maintain Site Rank in Search Results After a Breakdown

The solution method will depend on the search engine since they are somewhat different in Yandex and Google.

If You Use Yandex

You need to work on having the server respond with code 429, indicating server difficulties under load. Thus, when pages are analyzed by a bot, it will consider the code displayed. Code 429 will allow you to reduce the speed of web resource crawling, and the order of page placement will not change.

If You Use Google

In this search engine, it is necessary to use code 503, which signals a loss of access to the host. The search system will evaluate this code as the web resource encountering issues with a high load level or heavy requests.

Conclusion

The loss of the ability to use a site is quite a common occurrence. It can be caused by competitor attacks or technical issues. The primary goal of the attack is to remove the site from search results, necessitating spending on advertising and halting business development.

If you face such a problem, act promptly. In the case of Google, choose code 503, and for Yandex – 429. Do not leave code 404, as web pages will immediately drop in ranking or even be excluded. Code 200 is recommended to be returned only after the site’s functionality has been restored.