Link Requests are really Annoying

Recently I've been getting a lot of Link Requests from various people and content marketing companies. While I can understand why people do this and why people will ask for a link, sometimes it just gets really annoying and is a waste of my time.

Some people might be wondering “What are Link Requests?” Essentially a Link Request is when someone asks to place a link on your website. Most of the time people offer to guest post or blog in exchange for placing a link in the article. In my opinion this is a perfectly fair practice and Google doesn't have a problem with it. (As long as the article is reasonable and wasn't written by someone who isn't a native English speaker from some far off Asian country.)

However, what I have a problem with is when I get email Link Requests like this;

Dear Adam,

Hello, my name is Jimmy. I'm the webmaster and editor of
Shitty-Affiliate-Laden-Web-Hosting-Site.com. I'm writing to plug our newest article
on our blog: 101 [Shitty] Google+ Pages for Web Hosting News and Tips. I
thought that you and your site's audience might be interested in having a
look. Check it out:

“Link Goes Here”

I would appreciate if you could link to our article if you find it of
interest. And please feel free to e-mail me with any questions or suggestions
for the list.

Thanks,
Jimmy

What did this guy do wrong?

First it's clear he spent too much time writing his horrible article instead of actually reading or looking at my blog or anything I've worked on. He doesn't point out any content that I've written that he likes nor does he give me a compelling reason to link to the shitty article. So he really doesn't know who my audience is. Second, why the fuck would I send visitors to look at a blog post covering 101 Google+ pages about web hosting on an affiliate laden site? Seriously, do you people think I haven't been around the block and consequently that I am a idiot? The site this guy runs offers little value outside of the fact that he makes money on affiliate links. It's not even like this site posts reviews or offers good web hosting advice on the blog. He's probably one of those people at Affiliate Summit I would have met and largely ignored. By the way nobody has the fucking time to look through so many social media pages on a blog post. In addition a lot of those Google+ pages didn't cover web hosting or only did on occasion.

I've changed around a few things but the email is basically intact. I did add the URL though, which I thought was a nice touch. 🙂

My reply to this Link Request was, “Not sure why I would link to the article.” Since the domain name for the website was 4 letters and when I checked the domain history it was clear they had bought it from someone, I casually asked how much they paid for it. Since it's been several days and have not had a reply, I know I am not getting one.

This didn't surprise me actually as “Jimmy” probably didn't send out the email but had a Virtual Assistant (VA) do it. Pretty common for ad laden sites and SEO (search engine optimizers) do farm out these emails. However, if by chance you do get a reply I recommend you reply back. Not only did they make me annoyed sending the email but they've made me pissed even more since they didn't respond. Why would I ever work with them in the future?

Let me make this clear to my readers and anyone who is going to send Link Requests my way. I DO NOT link to sites that are just affiliate link wastelands. If you contact me straight up asking for a link there better be a good fucking reason or you will get an email that will make Satan happy.

Have you ever gotten annoying Link Requests? Do you respond or not respond? Is it good to be nice or make so that these people never want to contact you again?

Mailman Email List Manager, Not for Everyone

Recently I've been trying to find a good free email list newsletter program that I can run from the shared hosting account I already pay for. The program you can use that is already installed in cPanel is Mailman email. While not the prettiest software it's been around for quite awhile and is reliable and stable. There is one big problem with MailMan though, it's a huge pain in the ass to use!

From what I've read about Mailman email and from what I can tell it's mainly popular among large educational institutions and IT departments. The main reason for this is that MailMan has the ability for users of a list to send emails and not just the administrator of the email list. This means people can communicate with each other private on an email list, similar to what Yahoo Groups offers. (Are you old enough to remember those? I am!)

While Mailman might have great and powerful features honestly it does not have the most user friendly design. It's got a high learning curve and for those that love Richard Stallman (if you don't know who that just search his name) it's probably great. I've tried to scour the web for good tutorials but haven't really found any. It's built by hackers for hackers.

This is not so surprising since Mailmain email is a GNU project and is written in Python. However, what does surprise me is that cPanel still comes packaged with Mailman. I mean how many people are really using this email list manager? I am thinking very few are, especially when you could install PHPList or Dada Mail which seem much easier to use from what I can tell. I'm surprised that cPanel has not moved to another email software and abandoned Mailman altogether. I assume it's probably because web hosting companies don't actually want people using their shared hosting accounts for sending out email newsletters. They'd rather you pony up the money for an Aweber, MailChimp, GetResponse, ConstantContact, etc. subscription so you they don't get spam complaints on their servers. Why come installed with Mailman in the first place though?

If you've tried to use Mailman email and been frustrated by how difficult it is to use, I'd like to hear about it. If you have used another email list manager, like PHPList, I'd be happy to hear about your experiences too.

I am a fan of free open source software. It's just Mailman is not for me and is not worth the hassle.

NameSilo Review: Clear Pricing, Simple Interface, and Easy Domain Management

I've been using a new domain name registrar, NameSilo, for awhile now so I thought I would write up a NameSilo Review if anyone is considering buying or transferring domains to them. This NameSilo Review is going to be as complete and detailed as possibly and you won't find any better review than what you are about to read, I guarantee it! 🙂

Just as a disclaimer I have included affiliate links in this review. This means I get a commission if you click through to one of these links and buy or transfer a domain with NameSilo. However nobody can “buy” my opinion on this blog and this review reflects my honest opinions about NameSilo and their service as a domain name registrar.

NameSilo Review

NameSilo is a relatively new domain name registrar that has been in business since 2009. This small, but fast growing registrar, has gained a lot of new customers mainly by word-of-mouth via online forums and by not using pleasant tactics other domain registrars use. What does that mean? Hard upsells, a confusing checkout process, different prices on domain registration and renewals, selling web hosting, charging for Whois privacy, etc. NameSilo's mission is to make domain registration and management as easy as possible and they do good job.

NameSilo User Interface

NameSilo has one of the easiest domain management and user interfaces of any domain registrar I have used or seen. Changing nameservers, renewing and paying for names, transferring domains to NameSIlo, transferring out, turning privacy on or off, etc. is all easy and painless thanks to the intuitive user interface. Buttons are big, clearly marked, and easy-to-understand. Check out my awesome screenshot!

Like any UI it will take some getting used to but I think most people should be able to navigate NameSilo's Domain Manager dashboard quickly.

I see a lot of people say NameSilo has the best user interface of any domain registrar out there, but I'm unsure. I definitely prefer it over NameCheap‘s UI which I always have found confusing and I think the text is too small. (GoDaddy… don't even ask as most people will tell you they hate it, including me.)

Overall it's hard to beat NameSilo's easy-to-use UI and the way they clearly present everything in their backend.

Domain Search and Registering

Searching and registering domain names with NameSilo is a straightforward and easy process. Like I said above, the user interface is simple and easy-to-understand. NameSilo makes purchasing domain names as hassle free as can be.

I do have some complaints about searching and registering domains with NameSilo though. When searching for domains it automatically selects .CO as well as .COM for some reason. I understand they want to make more money on .CO registrations (since they charge $22.49 for per year) but who really needs a .CO if you can get the .COM? Honestly I would prefer a .NET or .ORG but that is my personal preference and opinion. I know the tech community and startups love .CO domains and .IO domains these days, but really? (NameSilo doesn't support .IO in case you were wondering. Probably a good thing as .IO domains lost me money.)

In addition NameSilo's shopping cart defaults to a 2-year registration period for domains instead of 1 year. This is something that you usually see from other registrars and I honestly don't like it.

UPDATE: NameSilo seems to have changed the registration process for domains. It no longer automatically selects .CO domains and the default is to only have the .COM selected. I imagine other NameSilo customers had similar complaints, and they might have read this review, which is why they changed the domain search defaults.

NameSilo's bulk domain search is straightforward as well. One nice thing is that you can upload a TXT file of domains names that you want to search availability on. Useful if you are looking for a large list of domains. You can search up to 500 domain names at a time using NameSilo's bulk search. The domain bulk search works fine but it can be a bit cubersome and clunky to use. It benefit from having a separate landing page and larger menu and input field to work with.

NameSilo also offers the ability to buy premium domain names (domains owned by someone else) through them if you wish. I doubt many people are interested in that though since most probably flock to NameSilo due to their low pricing.

NameSilo Domain Transfers

Domain transfers in and out of NameSilo are pretty straightforward and easy. I've only had trouble transferring domains in from 1and1 (which is a domain registrar you shouldn't use.) Just make sure you have the correct EPP or authorization code and have unlocked the domain name from the losing registrar if you are going to be transferring to NameSilo.

A great feature that NameSilo offers for transferring domain name to an outgoing registrar is that you can approve a transfer in their backend without waiting. Typically it can take 5-10 days for a domain transfer to go through. This means with NameSilo you just need to retrieve the authorization code via email and once that is approved by NameSilo, you can go to the “Transfer Manager” in your account and approve the transfer immediately. The only other domain name registrar I have seen offer outbound domain transfer approvals in their backend is GoDaddy.

NameSilo DNS Propagation & Management

NameSilo's DNS propagation is pretty snappy. The usual amount of time I've waited for nameservers to update and see it on my end is 10-20 minutes. NameSilo says nameserver updates on their end are updated immediately, of course that doesn't matter unless the update gets to you quickly. Keep in mind DNS updates around the world can take up to 48 hours to propagate. Today I had to wait a few hours for a domains nameservers to change.

In addition managing DNS with NameSilo is quite easy and they don't cut corners when it comes to DNS management. This registrar offers a full range of DNS services which allows you to change CNAME, MX, and A records.

Also NameSilo makes it easy to apply templates with domains for using different services such as Blogger, Google Apps, Squarespace, Weebly, Yola, Zenfolio, Tumblr, and SmugMug. This is a nice feature if you are someone who is buying a domain name to use with an 3rd party web hosting service. (Of course I don't recommend doing this and tell people it's better to buy web hosting with a company like Site5.) If you are not comfortable with making DNS changes to your domain, this should help you set it up somewhat easily.

NameSilo Pricing

NameSilo's claims to have “The Cheapest Domains on the Internet” as well as the “Cheapest Everyday Prices on the Web.” While this sounds like a lofty claim and marketing ploy, as far as I can tell this seems to be accurate. If you exclude coupons that other larger domain registrars offer, like NameCheap or GoDaddy, the everyday pricing is extremely competitive and the price you see is the price you pay.

NameSilo does not charge the $18 cent Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) fee on domains and they do not charge for Whois privacy. That is included in the price when purchase domains. NameCheap, Godaddy and a lot of other registrars tack on these fees when you are checking out.

Here are all the domains that NameSilo currently supports and their pricing. Prices are for registration and renewal.

COM – $8.99
NET – $8.09
ORG – $9.19
INFO – $9.59
BIZ – $9.99
CO – $22.49
MOBI – $7.89
ME – $16.99

These prices are for regular NameSilo pricing if you are ordering under 49 domain names. (Sounds like a lot but some people own thousands of domains.) They have bulk discounts as well as the NameSilo Discount Program. This allows you to save 10 cents off per domain name if your prefund your NameSilo account and pay that way. I am not sure what the advantage is for NameSilo but I assume they make money on holding money, like a bank. If you don't want to prefund your NameSilo account you can pay with a credit card with Visa, MasterCard, AmericanExpress, and Discover. Online payment solutions include PayPal, Skrill (formerly MoneyBookers), and Payza if you prefer.

UPDATE: NameSilo now accepts Google Wallet, Bitcoin, and Dwolla for payment.

Transfer pricing is reasonable too;

COM – $8.39
NET – $7.89
ORG – $8.99
INFO – $9.19
BIZ – $9.79
CO – $22.49
MOBI – $13.99
ME – $15.99

If you want to save $1 off on registration or transfers use the coupon codes – NAMESILO27 or SAVEDOLLAR1. (FYI these are my codes.)

Only comparable pricing that matches NameSilo from what I've seen is Internet.bs (no, not that BS but .BS is the country code top level domain name for the Bahamas.) which has free Whois privacy and doesn't charge an ICANN fee as well. There is also Resell.biz but you would need to setup to be a domain reseller with them. Still with Resell.biz's pricing structure you would only need to spend $500 over the lifetime of your account to get their bulk pricing which is extremely competitive. A lot of people use them since it's easy to spend over $500 on renewing domains. In addition DynaDot's bulk pricing is on par with NameSilo's bulk pricing, but DynaDot at the time of this writing does not offer free Whois privacy. I heard DynaDot was considering changing this though.

No matter how you cut it NameSilo pricing is hard to beat and they seem to be picking up a lot of business because of it.

*All pricing was accurate at the time this post was written.

NameSilo Support

NameSilo support is decent and fast to respond mostly any time during the day. Response time on weekends is even pretty good. NameSilo support is usually pretty helpful about answering questions but sometimes I have found that support is a bit snobbish since often they just link to their knowledgeable base without a clear explanation.

NameSilo offers email and chat support, but there is no phone support. With domain names I don't anticipate that you will need tons of support or have a lots of questions, unlike web hosting, but you never know.

Final Thoughts about NameSilo

In addition to what I've already mentioned I have had a few issues with NameSilo. They advertise “Free Domain Parking” which you use with Google Adsense. I am unsure if it is allowed to use a Google Adsense account on parked domains though. Google shutdown their domain parking program a few years, even though the company makes money with agreements with domain parking companies.

If you are going to use their domain parking option with Google Adsense it might be a good idea to setup an LLC.

Another thing which bothered me was I recommended a family member move some domains from another registrar to NameSilo. He used my affiliate link to make the transfer but I didn't use my coupon code, but a bulk transfer code they were offering at the time. I noticed I didn't get an affiliate commission, which made me feel jibbed. I asked about it and they said it was because it was a bulk transfer and he didn't use one my my coupon codes. I won't cry about it but it was annoying.

For those of you interested in an easy-to-use straightforward domain pricing and free Whois privacy, NameSilo is definitely a good option. They have a lot of great features and don't cut corners even with their low pricing.

I am personally hesitant to keep my important and key domains with them as they are a new domain registrar though. I will use them for keeping domains I have development plans for, but don't want to spend too much money renewing ever year. That's why NameSilo is a good name I guess.

NameSilo also doesn't fill all my domain needs as I own a handful of .US domains. At this time NameSilo does not support ccTLDs (country code top level domains) except for .ME and .CO currently. I imagine this isn't a big deal for most people though.

It's kind of hard for me to believe that NameSilo can continue with their pricing strategy without moving into other markets or jacking up prices. A lot of domain registrars slowly have price increases and start charging for Whois privacy and taking on ICANN fees as they grow larger.

NameSilo did introduce domain auctions for expiring domains a few months ago. According to RegistrarOwl, which is run by NameSilo, they have about 108,000 domains under management. That means that on any given day there are not going to be too many deleting domain gems dropping under their control. As they grow, this will likely change and I assume bring in more revenue for NameSilo.

Some might not remember this but GoDaddy got big by undercutting the competition in price back when they were first getting started. Now their coupon pricing might be good, but their service isn't all that great. Since NameSilo is using the same strategy, despite my reservations, I really have no doubt in my mind that in a few years NameSilo could become a major player in the domain industry. That is if… they are not bought out and stick to their original business goals.

It is quite possible that NameSilo could get gobbled up by a big domain registrar in the domain industry since I am pretty sure execs at GoDaddy, Demand Media, Name Media, etc. will see this little domain registrar slowly increasing their market share as threat. They could very well buy them out at some point.

My hope though is that NameSilo sticks to their original mission of providing no-headaches and ho-hassles when it comes to domain registration and management. No web hosting, SEO products, etc. which I won't buy from a domain registrar anyway.

Bottom line is that NameSilo is good if you have 1 or 1000's of domain names.

If you use NameSilo and think I've missed something in this NameSilo Review please leave a comment below. If you have any questions about NameSilo let me know below and I will answer them to the best of my knowledge.

Just as a reminder you can save $1 off on registration or transfers with these NameSilo coupon codes – NAMESILO27 or SAVEDOLLAR1. These NameSilo coupon codes will work for most domain registrations and domain transfers with NameSilo. Each code can be redeemed once per person per account.

Again I've included affiliate links in this review but that does not change my opinion. If you received value and insight from this NameSilo review I appreciate any help so that I can continue to write informative and honest reviews on this blog.

HostGator Parks Domain Names to Make Money off Your Websites

I discovered something pretty sneaky about HostGator web hosting. Hostgator parks domain names which are using their DNS (domain name system) if you are not using your domains.

What happened the other day was I was trying to create a subdomain for this blog and Singing Dogs to use on Tumblr. I recently deleted my Facebook account since I want to focus on other social networks, like Tumblr. The nice thing about Tumblr is that sharing is very quick, fluid, and part of the ecosystem and links are DoFollow. (Unlike Facecrook run by Mark Fuckerberg.) To get the maximum SEO (search engine optimization) benefit out of using a Tumblr blog it's best to setup a subdomain. Lots of startups nowadays host company blogs on subdomains on Tumblr for the SEO benefits and due to the fact content is much more likely to get shared readily.

As I was trying to add a CNAME record to create the subdomain at my domain name registrar, something must have went wrong. I checked the main domain, AdamYamada.com, and saw this website was being parked.

“WTF? HostGator!” is all I could think to myself. I then thought, “Well, maybe this is just a fluke or something.” Then I checked Singing Dogs and HostGator was parking that domain too!

For those that don't know what domain parking is, it is essentially displaying ads on a domain name instead of putting up a blog, forum, or website with content. The domain owner hopes visitors will click on displayed ads, earning them revenue. Domain parking is a big industry and something that earns a lot of people good money, but a hosting company shouldn't be doing this in my opinion. If you are going to route DNS anywhere it should be to at least advertise your web hosting offerings. Even if you have domain names you are not doing anything with I think domain parking sucks.

If you land on a subdomain that doesn't exsist or you haven't setup, HostGator will display a 404 error page advertising their hosting. It's just weird they do it on a main domain name since most other hosting companies would at least display an error page to let you know something went wrong, instead of trying to earn money. What's fucked up about this is the fact that HostGator shouldn't be making money off customer's domains parking them. When I got on the phone with HostGator support today I was going to tell the service representative off, but it wasn't worth my time.

I am seriously inclined to move backed to Site5 after this domain parking incident. I've also been having error issues which HostGator blamed on caching but I know that isn't the issue.

Let's not forget the major outage at the Provo, Utah datacenter which took out customer's websites with BlueHost, JustHost, HostMonster, and HostGator. All companies are owned by Endurance International Group (EIG) which is sort of infamous for buying hosting companies… and then ruining them. HostGator is starting to become like the all other EIG web hosts, crap!

HostGator Down along with other EIG Hosts causes Web Hysteria

HostGator Down! Noooo, my websites are not up!

This sentiment was shared on Friday as most of HostGator's sites along with JustHost, BlueHost, and HostMonster‘s customers sites went offline for many hours and experienced intermittent downtime, slow loading websites, and generally poor site performance.

With a lot of frustration and no clear answers from HostGator I sent out this Tweet on Friday. This got shared on YFS Magazine Facebook page, a magazine for young entrepreneur's, and got a healthy number of ReTweets and favorites since others felt the same way.

This is me because all my websites are down due to bad #webhosting with #HostGator. pic.twitter.com/H0ppBCV6ax

— Adam Yamada-Hanff (@AdamYamada) August 2, 2013

You might want to check out some other Tweets regarding the outages as there a lot of other funny, rude, and crazy ones. When people can't access or work on their websites the niceties go out the window and web hysteria kicks in.

It should be noted that HostGator, JustHost, BlueHost, and HostMonster are all owned by the same company Endurance International Group (EIG). EIG web hosts are notorious for overselling and packing servers with tons of websites leading to poor and slow site performance.

Until recently HostGator was considered one of the best web hosting companies to work with. I actually moved from Site5 to HostGator since I have hosted with HostGator before and found they were a good web hosting company.

That was until they moved their datacenter from SoftLayer's facilities in Dallas, Texas to the Provo, Utah facility about 3-4 weeks ago. Every since the datacenter move happened the websites I have hosted with HostGator (including this blog currently, but that will likely change) ALL my sites have had issues loading slow and I have had quite a lot of downtime even before the EIG datacenter fiasco on Friday. I've tried to work with HostGator support about these issues but they didn't seem to care or think there was a problem. They essentially were like, “Yeah, F$%# you we know the servers are overpacked.”

I assume the reason all the Provo, Utah datacenter has been having issues is that HostGator manages 1% of the world's websites. When you move that much data into an already packed datacenter, well you are going to have problems. Probably not something that EIG executives want to hear about since they want to have an Initial Public Offering (IPO) soon. Therefore you better cut costs and make the company look like a better investment. Am I right?

Initially HostGator blamed the problem on a “network issue” and it was not clear whether it was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on the Provo datacenter or something that was caused by EIG. Because of the wide anger and hysteria EIG setup a simple WordPress website called Endurance Response and posted this;

During the morning of August 2, 2013, Endurance International Group’s data center in Provo, UT experienced unexpected issues that impacted customers of Bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster and JustHost. Company websites and some phone services were affected as well.

Many of our customers’ sites are back online. Some customers may continue to experience intermittent access and slowness until services are fully restored. Customer should not experience any loss of data.

The resources of our entire company are focused on the recovery, including our executive team, which is leading these efforts from our command center in Burlington, MA. The team will issue updates at enduranceresponse.com every 30 minutes until all customer services are restored. Following the restoration of services, Endurance will conduct a thorough review of this incident.

Ron LaSalvia, Chief Operating Officer, has expressed his message to customers, “We understand that your sites are your lifeblood, as well as the engine to our economy, and we have committed all company resources, nationwide to a swift resolution and full restoration.”

When I emailed HostGator they said again it was a network issue and then said it was DDOS. Apparently EIG can't keep their story straight as I did not see anywhere on Endurance Response that it said they had a DDOS.

What is annoying is that having lots of website down-time can affect search engine rankings. (Of course this depends on how much traffic your blog gets and how often the Googlebot crawls your site.)

I want to make it clear to everyone that I understand when web hosting companies have downtime. This it to be expected if you are using a shared hosting honestly. It just is not possible since you are sharing the server resources with other people. However… HostGator still has yet to provide me with clear answers about the outages and bad performance before this major HostGator down-time, along with the other EIG web hosts, and make it clear what the exactly the problem was.

Endurance International Group now has taken HostGator from being a great host with great support to a host that people are fleeing from. (According to Twitter and other social media channels at least.) Even though I wrote about HostGator deals before on this blog and have recommended them, I have removed all affiliate links from this blog and all of my websites. I can't in good faith recommend HostGator anymore to my friends or followers and I hope you appreciate my honesty, even it will cost me a few affiliate commissions. For your information, I won't be giving any business to Endurance International Group hosting companies in the future either.

Personally I am probably going to be moving back to Site5 because of the HostGator down-time and lack of support. Site5 provides good and knowledgeable support, but can be too technical at times, and don't overpack servers. You can read my Site5 Review to get a better idea about their web hosting services.

If you are a customer with HostGator, BlueHost, JustHost, or HostMonster I would recommend using a website monitoring service. (You should for all of your websites no matter what the host is.) I like Uptime Robot and it is completely free website monitoring service and allows up to 50 monitors. Downtime alerts can be sent via email, text message, or RSS feed notifications.

If you are currently with an EIG host has the recent datacenter outage made you think about moving to another web hosting company? Where are going to move and how do you determine a good host? How does it make you feel when you can't access or your website is down and there is no clear explanation?

Does site Downtime hurt Search Engine Rankings?

“Does site downtime hurt Search Engine rankings? ”

This is a question that is hotly debated by webmasters, search engine optimization specialists, bloggers, hosting companies, etc. A lot of people say that a little bit of downtime, say 20 minutes, in a day, can hurt SERPS (search engine results page) for your website. Others say that you can have a little bit of downtime here and there and it will not matter much.

Well this question was touched on in one of a Google Webmaster Help videos with Matt Cutts recently. Check it out and the question that was asked.

I got a “Googlebot can't access your site” message in Webmaster Tools from my host being down for a day. Does it affect my rankings when this happens?
Sally

Matt Cutts initial response to this question was,

“Well if it is just for a 1 day you should be in pretty good shape. If your host is down for 2 weeks then there is a better indicator that the website is down and we don't want to send users to a website that is actually down but we do try to compensate for websites that are transiently or sporadically down. We make a few allowances and we try to comeback 24 hours later… So it is just a short period of downtime I wouldn't really worry about that.”

While I mostly agree with what he said in the video, and after explaining that the Googlebot was having trouble crawling sites a few weeks ago, Matt Cutts commented, “If it is just 24 hours I really wouldn't stress about that very much.”

Well… a friend of mine recently had his websites on a JustHost dedicated server and it went down for 1 day. He told me hasn't been able to get back his SERP rankings since the downtime. Despite what was said you should realize downtime can hurt your search engine rankings in Google. I've heard this from a number of experienced webmasters.

However, I want people to think about how the Googlebot spider works when indexing pages. I will not go into everything as it would take too long to explain but just do a quick overview.

When you do a Google search you are not actually searching the web instantly, like a lot of people assume, but you are actually searching Google's stored version of the web. For instance when this article was first posted it DID NOT immediately get indexed by Google and was searchable. Why? While this blog gets ok traffic my current pagerank is 3, which is decent but not too high. Sites that post content more frequently and that have a higher pagerank are going to get crawled before mine. Websites like FoxNews and NY Times will get crawled first since they have a higher pagerank, more content, and are in Google News.

So if my website was down for say 1 hour it is actually pretty possible that Google will not even see my website is down since the Googlebot may not crawl it. While Google is really good about crawling new webpages very fast these days they can't get to every new piece of content posted simultaneously. If you were running FoxNews and had downtime 24 hours that would be a much bigger deal since they get millions of visitors a day and the Googlebot expects there to be content frequently.

So my answers to the question “Does site downtime hurt Search Engine rankings?” would generally be the same as Cutts. I caution anyone asking this question to consider the type of website you are running, how much traffic you get, and your user's expectations which will influence Google's. Choosing a reliable web hosting company is very important if you want good uptime and don't want to have to worry about websites going down. I prefer Site5 and you can read my Site5 review to get a better idea about their web hosting services.

So that is my professional opinion on this topic of site downtime and search engine rankings. By the way if you want to monitor website downtime and uptime I highly recommend a service called Uptime Robot. It will ping your website every 5 minutes to see if it is up and if it isn't you can get a text message, email, or RSS feed notification. Best part about Uptime Robot is that it is completely free website monitoring service.

Has website downtime ever hurt or affected your search engine rankings? Have you ever had your website hosted with a hosting company that had frequent downtime? Share your experiences below as I am sure a lot of people have something to say about this.