| What to do after a host crash. |
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| General |
| Written by Turtleknife |
| Friday, 26 February 2010 12:58 |
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If you were affected by the Westhost server crash in February/2010 that saw some sites offline for nearly a week, then there are some things you should probably do to make sure Google knows you are still in business. After all, if your blog or website normally has crawls from search engines, and then all of a sudden the spiders can't get to your site for a week - well then some of those programs may have written you and your business right off of the internet. So it could be more urgent than you know, but you need to get those crawling programs back to your site to re-establish any lost data in their records. Here are some strategies to do that. Write an article for distributionWrite an article for an article directory and link it to your website. This is one of the most effective ways to get crawls back to your website because of how often Google and other search engines crawl article sites. Of course EzineArticles.com is the best site, but GoArticles and ArticlesBase allow your article to be published immediately, so put them on all three. Also, when linking back to your website, make sure one of the links goes to your sitemap - that is assuming your sitemap is updated with ALL links to pages within your website.
 (1) This keyword is linked to my sitemap.
Make a new blog post. Ok this sounds obvious but not only should you just make a blog post, you should also send it to Digg AND Stumble Upon, even if you have to SU it just yourself. Those backlinks count and are scoured often. In addition, make a swap with someone else for link exchanges within each of your blog posts, linking back to each other, but don't forget to make a couple selective links withing the blog post to other pages on YOUR site.
Make a new Youtube video with a backlink. In the description area of your new video make sure to send a link back to your site. Most experts have said this is a no-follow type of link, but Google owns Youtube, and Google crawlers check those links through. If you can make a video, make sure to send it to as many sites as you can, or use Tube Mogul to expedite that delivery.
Make a Google SideWiki entry. Go to your sitemap, or older blog post, or important keyword page in your website and add a Google SideWiki entry. In that SideWiki entry, embed another page of your site with an HTML link. When you publish the SideWiki, add it to a Blogger Blog automatically and then go ahead and send it to Twitter and facebook as well. I published this SideWiki on my sitemap page, and simultaneously published this to my Blogger Blog shown below.
 Notice the two new links posted in that entry. (1), (2)  Within 2 hours, my Google alerts sent me the SideWiki and Blogspot notices to my email, so I KNOW Google has been there, already.
 Also don't forget to Tweet your link using a shortening service. Do this for your SideWiki and some other links on your website, even older posts. Stumble Upon is excellent for Tweeting and Retweeting your old links.  Here I retweeted one of my blog posts from last week, to the site that was down again. This is through StumbleUpon, which if you haven't got an account there, it is one of the powerful linking strategies you can use, and combined with Google SideWiki, you can get a page indexed, literally in minutes.
What about Westhost now? If you are thinking about leaving Westhost because of this outage, I would seriously think again. Yes, I was as frustrated as most and can estimate a loss of at least $500-$1,000 this week because somebody pulled the wrong switch. The reality is, I don't think ANY host is prepared for something like this and because Westhost is a reliable company, I feel they will look to this incident and become one of the market leaders in back-up and emergency situation management. And after this week, they are truly the only company that could envision how bad things can go wrong in an instant. In reality, as stressed as I was, I probably would have lost my marbles if I had to deal with such a catastrophe had I been on the other end of this - working the phones and customer service for Westhost. Honestly, they did a good job holding things together in spite of NOT being prepared. I would personally like to thank (and apologize) to the many livehelp staff which I verbally abused in the midst of my angst.
Don't forget to link to your websites in your blog posts over the next few days, just like this: Poker Calculators. |
