Plastic Surgeon Web Site Promotion: The Disappearing Website

When it comes to plastic surgeon web site promotion, the search engines are one of the best ways to promote your site. Of course, optimizing your website to perform well in search engine rankings can require a great deal of time and effort. As such, there’s nothing more frustrating than when your once high ranking website suddenly drops so low that no one’s likely to find it. Even worse is when it vanishes altogether from the search index. There are several common reasons why this may occur, and the following tips can help you to find, fix and avoid the problem.

• Check the server. Though many web hosting companies offer 99% reliable uptime, it’s always possible that it was during that 1% downtime that the search engine spider decided to visit. To check that your server is up, try to access your website online. If not, call your hosting company right away. Unfortunately, your page may be dropped from the search engines until the spider revisits your site, and even if you resubmit a dropped page it can take months to show up. There are software tools to alert you when your server isn’t responding so that you can better avoid this problem.
• Check the web host’s terms. If your site is being hosted along with adult sites or sites known for spamming search engines, your server’s IP address may be banned. Check your site’s server logs to see if the spiders have been visiting. Also check your web hosting company’s terms of service to see if they allow adult or gambling sites. If this is the case, move your site to a new hosting company.
• Check the Robots.txt file. The Robots.txt file lists the pages on your site that search engines are allowed to visit and those they’re not. The page in question may be on that ‘do not visit’ list or may have been placed in the wrong directory keeping the spider from finding it.
• Check that you’re up to date with payment. Check that your payments are up to date if your paying for placement, indexing or inclusion as with Overture, Inktomi or Yahoo. Also take a look at old emails to make sure you haven’t missed a payment notification. Simply make your payment and your site will go back into the index.
• Check your content. There may be a problem with the algorithm you’re using, or the formula that search engines use for ranking pages. Algorithms are constantly being changed by the search engines, and your page rank may change along with them.