6 replies to this topic

[lister]

Your site being offline must have terrible effects on SEO so I set-up a ping your site free service.

Since I moved hosting it constantly tells me the site is up and down with a downtime of 2 minutes.....

Now the odd thing is that if I visit the site it is up and friends in other countries tested for me and it IS up?

Also, I checked via a site that validates if your site is up which also verifies that it is up.

Any ideas what is causing this false positive - or is the site ping accurate that maybe it is offline for a few seconds??

COnfused....

[Jill]

Perhaps you should try a different pinging service? Sounds like that one may not be working properly.

[chrishirst]

The server firewall may be blocking outgoing ICMP packets.

[lister]

The server firewall may be blocking outgoing ICMP packets.

That is an interesting reply and it might be the case.....

I host with godaddy - not sure if anyone reading this has had same experiuence.

I did change ping service and again up/down up/down but when i check all is well....

I am obviosuly concerned that any bots are expreincing this up/down issue and not indexing anything anymore....

The google webmaster account reported some pages as being 404 when I know they are not 404. Is this a potential flag to a bigger problem?

Thanks

[AffiliateClue]

At risk of sounding like a crank....

The simplest solution is to simply move to a new webhost. Godaddy has a history of service and reliability problems in the hosting department.

[chrishirst]

Try with http://www.downforev...neorjustme.com/ or http://www.downforeveryone.com/ or setup a free trial account at http://internetseer.com/


And Godaddy have been known to be very helpful and block those pesky bandwidth wasting search engine crawlers from your site with a robots.txt file.

[lister]

Try with http://www.downforev...neorjustme.com/ or http://www.downforeveryone.com/ or setup a free trial account at http://internetseer.com/
And Godaddy have been known to be very helpful and block those pesky bandwidth wasting search engine crawlers from your site with a robots.txt file.

Yes I know the downforme service and it says that the site is up when the ping says it is down.

Is there evidence or experience behind your comment on godaddy placing a (hidden) robots.txt file? In your opinion would you change hosting?

I have had good experience with godaddy but this ping issue is weird and does raise an alarm bell - I will call them and let you know that they say.

Thanks

********* UPDATE The guy i spoke to at godaddy laughed when i told him about the blocking of google bots.....anyways he said that the possible reason the ping service didnt work is because my hosting is on a shared hosting and does not have a dedicated IP....

Anyways - i went into google webmasters and all seems well, the last crawl was a few days ago AND I did the "Fetch as GoogleBot" which came back as Successful so I guess I can be relaxed - or should I still be concerned about this up/down issue?

THANKS

Edited by lister, 13 July 2011 - 09:10 AM.