newmediamike.com recently experienced an extended server outage thanks to the Ice Storm that hit Toronto just before Christmas. newmediamike.com was offline from December 22 until January 5.
I conducted a search for my most popular posts to see if I had been hit in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) and sure enough, none of my posts were listed. Neither was newmediamike.com for that matter. I immediately knew what I had to do to get back on the SERP.
Here are the steps I took to recover from the extended server outage. This post will be updated over the next several days with the progress being made in recovering from the extended server outage.
How to recover from an extended server outage
First thing I did was update my sitemap. Once I had an updated site map I then went to Google Webmaster Tools. You do have GWT installed don’t you? If you don’t you need to install and authorize it pronto.
Once I was at Google Webmaster Tools I looked for messages from Google about not being able to access the site. Seeing those I knew that my site had likely been de-indexed due to the inability of the Googlebot to access it.
Next I requested a “fetch as Googlebot”. Once it had been registered as successful I re-submitted the site to be indexed. As a back up measure I also resubmitted the sitemap to Google.
With this out of the way I refreshed everything and searched once more for newmediamike.com.
Whew! My URL newmediamike.com was back on top for newmediamike.com.
Now to get the traffic back for my popular posts I decided to tweet about them again, using TweetDeck to space out the tweets over the next few days to avoid flooding my feed.
I also updated my Facebook page for newmediamike.
Stay tuned for updates over the next few days.
UPDATE January 8
My traffic has returned to almost normal levels after only three days. The resilience of creating compelling content people are searching for!