One day last week a situation occurred with a client’s site that demonstrated how fast the search engines react to problems with a website. This story illustrates the importance of constant vigilance and monitoring of the health of a website.

The website concerned has around 4000+ article pages indexed, with each article page consisting of templated boilerplate sections and the main article text pulled from a HTML include file. Unfortunately on this particular day the directory containing the article include text files was accidentally deleted from the web server. Every article page subsequently served reported an ASP sever execute error as the article text include file directory was missing. The article include directory was only restored from a backup around 12 hours later.

Within several hours of the problem being reported it was obvious that the search engines had taken notice. According to the Enquisite search metrics data for the site, there was a definite and almost immediate reduction in search referrals. As it turned out, there was around 50% less search engine referrals that day compared to the preceding and following days. This demonstrated that the article pages had a temporary reduction in ranking, resulting in the loss of search traffic for that particular day. So what happened from a search engine point of view?

We can assume that if the search spiders visited that day they noticed that the article pages lacked content and provided no value. It is also possible that the search engines took into account the users’ probable immediate and quick bounce from every article back to the search results page. Either of those explanations could result in the temporary loss of ranking witnessed for the article pages. What is certain is that the search engines reacted quickly to the problem by punishing each articles’ ranking which resulted in a devastating loss of traffic.