Website Up-time Monitoring - Getting Articles Indexed and Read

Using a website up-time monitoring service can bring you some pretty interesting, even suprising information that directly relates to getting your articles indexed and read. From time to time many niche advertisers and marketers get themselves stretched for time. As our businesses grow, chances are we add more niche sites, new product promotions, new email campaigns, and even enter new niches and recycle the whole thing again. There could however, be a grave danger to the growth and profitability of our niche sites. That potential lurking danger is website up-time.

Consider the following real life example of an article publishing disaster at one of my personal niche sites. I had secured hosting on a group of servers in different locations and with different ip’s to create a simple niche traffic funnel, with the traditional hub as my money site, and outlying sites driving and funneling traffic to the money site in the center. Old school one way link and authority building proven to work for the last six or more years.

Using all the niche advertising tools in my arsenal, I put up a money blog, keyword rich and long tail titled. I then did the same with my outlyer sites, and through RSS and direct linking, pointed the whole thing back to the hub. Volumes have been written about this, and it’s an ongoing topic in the Niche Advertising Newsletter of this site. No secrets what the expected and actual results were, in about three days I was page two for my niche. Next step, publish, publish, publish. Using some of the article publishing tools found here, I published a few articles to generate more back-links to the hub. Again predictable results with a quick hop to number four for my niche keywords out of roughly a quarter million results. Nothing to start an e-course with or retire on, but good for a nice little addition to the grocery budget, right? Now for the mistake, I moved on for a few weeks to another project, and that turned into a few more weeks.

By the time I went back to my auto-pilot niche site, I had slipped to around number 200. Traffic was almost nonexistent, but my outlyer sites were getting hits. So why no hub traffic, no clickthroughs, and no rank? The answer came when I signed up for a free service at a place called Basic State. (not an affiliate, just plain good old recommended tool.)

Basic State is a free web site up-time monitor service that actually pings and fetches your page from your server every fifteen minutes, sends you alerts when the response is fail, and again when it comes back alive. Then the service assembles the results into a Daily Up-time Report to your email inbox. Not bad for a free service, huh?

The results about blew me away, and while I don’t name the host for now, let’s just say that the advertised 99.8 to 99.9% up-time was a tick off the mark. For over thirty days, my “money hub site” where all the traffic and ranking should have gone, was nowhere to be found. Here’s what showed up in my inbox: (sorry for the jpg quality. My bad not theirs)

Uptime Report

Gee, I wonder why the search engines weren’t indexing or ranking me? I wonder where all my traffic went? I wonder if I can ever recover from such an embarrassing over-site on my part? Look, common sense tells us a couple things. If people can’t find our site, they can’t buy or click our Adsense adds. If the search engine spiders keep finding 404 or server not found, they quit coming back. Yet we as webmasters and marketers cannot physically monitor our sites 24×7. Enter Basic State.

With just a few clicks you can audit your server performance over a period of time, and be assured your site(s) are really available. Just point the service to the primary domain at your host, wait a day, and check your mail. It doesn’t get any easier. That’s what has me mad not at the host, but at myself. I had spent good money and time on niche market research, product planning, keyword research, hosting dollars, site setup time, article writing time, and on and on. Only to go from a “sticky number four” to below page ten or twenty, and all because I didn’t use a common sense tool like Basic State.

Now I’m not saying that we need to do this for months on end in most situations. Usually a quick audit of your server(s) from time to time is plenty. But I think this is a powerful article publisher tool we can all benefit from, and I highly recommend this website up-time monitoring tool to all my members.

By the way, look for an upcoming series of newsletter topics about recovering lost ranking(aaaarrrrrgggggghhh!!!).

Check out Basic State.

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Tags: article publisher tools, article publishing, article publishing tools, website up-time monitoring

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