Last week I discussed my involvement in SES Toronto 2008. Specifically I talked about how I went on a mission to find out why I’m still ranking in the same prominent positions for many of my important keywords but my traffic from Google (but not MSN or Yahoo) was down.

One of the people I connect with was Joe Dolson. Joe is I a freelance web designer living in Minnesota’s Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul). He has been operating as a free-lance web designer since the beginning of 2005, and has been building websites since 2002. I was referred to Joe at the conference because he is an accessibility and usability expert.

What was Joe’s response to my problem?

It’s a strange issue, certainly. I took a quick look at your site itself, and didn’t see anything which stood out as a problem. However, when I went to take a look at your server, I found a few odd issues.

First, several tools I applied returned an invalid name check on your domain — while I couldn’t confirm it, this implies some problems with DNS resolution for your site. It may be that you have some kind of behavioral sniffer running which is checking for robot activities - if that is the case, you may want to try disabling it to see if it’s been blocking legitimate traffic.

I also found that your server response time is pretty slow - based on ping queries from 38 different server locations around the world, the average query response time for your site was 2.09 sec. This isn’t particularly extreme, but two of the slowest locations were Philadelphia (5.12 seconds) and Portland (4.89 sec), followed by Los Angeles (4.63), Atlanta (4.36), and Orlando (4.28). This suggests that your server’s regional network is providing very poor response times to several major population centers of the US, which could also have a significant effect on your traffic - there may be a large percentage of people clicking on your results who never actually arrive at your site.

For comparison, my own website has an average response time of 0.80 seconds, with a high of 4.60 (from Moscow). The third slowest response time for me is 2.14 (also from LA.)

I suggest investigating a change of host, or at least taking up these connectivity issues with your host to see if they can help resolve any problem.

I didn’t identify anything which really behaved like a “smoking gun” in the limited time I had to check, but I’d definitely be concerned about this issue. It’s worth investigating further.

Best,
Joe

Thanks for the advice Joe! It looks like I have to connect with my hosting provider and see if they can lead me to the next step!

Meet YoungEntrepreneur.com co-founder Adam Toren at this year's BlogWorld 2008!

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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