SEO effects of my blog being down for a month
So, if you’ve been hanging around these parts for awhile, you’ll remember that this blog was down for about a month. Down, down, not just not being updated, but server down. It’s been back up for about two weeks and things have mostly shaken out - and I’m seeing what SEO effects occurred because of it.
The most obvious change was my loss of Page Rank - whereas I had been clocking in at a PR4 (and not long ago a PR5), I now have the honor of being PR0. Lending credence to the PR doesn’t really matter much anymore camp is the fact that my high ranking pages have returned to their august positions on the first page of their relevant searches - so that traffic has pretty much returned more or less unaltered. In general, my search engine traffic is about the same - difficult to pinpoint exactly since it fluctuates a reasonable amount.
I did lose a bunch of RSS subscribers, unsurprisingly. Again it is hard to tell, but prior to the fall I was moving in around 150 readers pretty consistently and am now slowly rebuilding that - in the 20’s and 30’s these days. The biggest loss was all my bloglines readers - apparently at some point of being down Bloglines just deletes everyone’s subscription to the feed, which is reasonable. I wish, though, that it behaved more like Google Reader where the subscription just lies fallow - so when my RSS feed came back to life it just started flowing back in just like nothing happened. My reach had been suffering, but it seems to be back to it’s previous levels as people remember that the site is back up. All in all, it wasn’t terrible.
Traffic wise, I’m pretty down I think - maybe 15-20%. A lot of backlinks are now old and not replaced with new ones, yet. It’s hard to tell precisely because I have a few images that did well in image searching - but I lost most of the images so now when people get them they are getting a 404 page which counts as a visit and a pageview. Funny thing is, those page convert about as well as my other pages - the bounce rate isn’t 100%! At any rate, hopefully I’ll get the images back soon.
And lastly, comments are down as well. Partially it has to do with traffic being down and also people not being used to the site being here. Hopefully, that’ll pick back up. I moved to Disqus for discussion and hope that will help as well.
So there it is, in general I’d say it wasn’t particularly catastrophic to the site. Most likely because it’s such a small site. Still, I’m glad of it and glad that most people stuck around. Thanks for reading! And if this is your first time by… you know… you ought to subscribe to my feed! :)
