Is Google offline? New status page from Google itself
Google is the most widely used search engine in the Western world and often beyond. With the billions of searches performed on it, Google is also integrated into the daily lives and work of many. From looking for a nice recipe for Christmas to searching for a local plumber. Google helps your find the right information.
As a website hosting owner, you depend in most cases for many your daily visitors from search results. Whether these are the natural results you manage to get, or the ads you run. Before, it was always a question of whether Google is completely up, and this was always conjecture by many as to whether this is the case. Now, however, Google has created a status page to ensure that it is clear to everyone whether Google is up and fully reachable. In this blog post, let's take a look at this page and what it can be used for.
Google's new status page
Google's new status page for Google Search or Search is a basic page that shows you the current status of its services. Three parts are covered separately in this, namely the Crawling, Indexing and Serving of Google Search results. All three indispensable factors for many a website. With crawling this means that a website's content can be discovered and processed, for example, as soon as you publish new content such as a blog post or new landing page it needs to be discovered before it is included in the search results. Depending on your website this may take some time, but normally it will be known to Google by 24 hours. So if there is a problem with this, you can check it at that site if it takes longer than expected.
The indexing follows the crawling, this is the inclusion in the search results of your latest content, website or other source, so if there would be a problem with this then a website as a whole can not be indexed. Or just parts of it may be temporarily unavailable through Google. Last is serving the crawled search results that are then indexed. This is the actual showing of the search results to the end user, and therefore what most people will see. So all three of these factors matter whether Google is fully functioning, and are therefore shown separately with a green checkmark when everything is in order. When one of the other signs is in the picture then you know something is going on, on Twitter it is possible to keep track of the current status.
Dependence on Google for many websites
For many, Google is the number one provider of traffic to the website, with the natural search results your website can be found by users with a specific problem or question. Or it can simply provide information. For most businesses, Organic search traffic to the website is a lesser role of bringing in new traffic. But with the right strategy, it can become so. In fact, companies are more often turning to advertising within Google and other sources such as Social Media to further market their products or services. After all, here as long as there is payment, it is fairly certain that a percentage of visits will come to your website. The process of getting results organically generally takes several months to bear fruit.
Many websites also have a target audience or set-up other than selling products or services directly, often informational blogs or websites specifically about a hobby or topic. And derive revenue from offering advertising space and linking to affiliate products. These websites often do not have paid ads because this is a different return. So these will rely more on Google's operation and indexing.
So with Google's status tool you can see at a glance if there is something going on with Google, or with your own configuration. Which can also remove a lot of doubt thus in certain moments. It does not often happen that Google is down, but now you can always check if all services are up, before you have to start tweeting. Very convenient!
