It’s 3 AM, do you know where your site is?

It’s 3 AM. You’ve had too much Caffeine. The thought crosses your mind, “I haven’t looked at my site recently.”

The Big “What If?”

What if it’s not where you left it?

It was on page one for your selected SCUBA-related search terms. Now, thanks to the Google Caffeine update, it’s gone. Or maybe it’s gone completely and no one told you.

These are easy situations to fix.

First, go do a Google search for your preferred keywords. Make sure you aren’t logged in, otherwise your rankings could be skewed based on your activities.

I personally am excited about the Caffeine update. See why? (Sorry, the image is long)

Sorry again about the long image. The key takeaway is that it appears to the searcher that I am the top eight results for the search term “SCUBA Marketing”. We can thank David for getting the first search result via Google Maps. The next seven are due to the fact that Google likes blogs. I’ve been gone for two months, Google does an update and I move up?

That’s the simple power of a blog.

Do you have a blog? If not, why not? If you do, do I know about it?

It’s Gone Gone

It’s quite possible your site has gone down completely. If you don’t notice it and no one tells you, you may never know. The thing is, many hosts offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If you do the math, that’s still almost 45 minutes per month your site is our of commission. So we can’t get too upset if it goes down every once in a while, but wouldn’t you like to know when it does?

I use a free tool from Pingdom that notifies me via SMS and/or email whenever my site goes down. They even have an iPhone app so I can check in whenever I want.

It’s a quick, effortless way for me to make sure my site is available for visitors to see. I strongly encourage everyone to setup an alert for their web site. Site down regularly? I host with Hostgator and have been very happy. They do have outages, but far fewer and shorter than anywhere else I’ve hosted over the years.

How did the Google Caffeine update impact your search results?

Photo via beverlyealdama