What Does HTTP Error 503 (Service Unavailable) Mean & How To Fix It? Imagine someone searches for a topic and finds your website on page one of Google. When they click through to your website, though, their eyes land on a bland webpage that says "Service Unavailable". What do you think they'll do when they find your website on Google again? Odds are, they'll skip over it and click on the next link. If visitors are looking for answers and you're promising them those answers, but you can't deliver because something's wrong with your website, they'll lose trust in your brand. Unfortunately, if your website experiences a 503 Service Unavailable Error, there's no silver bullet solution. You have to investigate what's actually causing the issue, because even though these types of errors indicate what happened to your website, they don't tell you why it happened. To help you fix your 503 Service Unavailable Error and avoid losing potential customers, check out our guide on what exactly the issue is and its most common solutions. When your website is experiencing a 503 Service Unavailable Error, your site's visitors will land on an error page. Fortunately, there are five common solutions for troubleshooting most 503 Service Unavailable Errors. 1. Restart your server. Sometimes, there will be congestion in the server chain that hosts your website. One of the most effective ways to open up and refresh it is to simply restart your web server. If your website is hosted on...

The Ultimate Guide to Google Search Console in 2021 What is Google Search Console? Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free platform for anyone with a website to monitor how Google views their site and optimize its organic presence. That includes viewing your referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries and pages. At any given time, I have GSC open in 2 to 10 tabs. It’s helpful on a macro and micro level -- both when I need to see how many impressions HubSpot is gaining month over month or figure out what’s happened to a high-traffic blog post that suddenly fell. I’m a content strategist on HubSpot’s SEO team, which means GSC is particularly useful to me. But anyone who’s got a website can and should dip their toes in these waters. According to Google, whether you’re a business owner, SEO specialist, marketer, site administrator, web developer, or app creator, Search Console will come in handy. I remember the first time I opened GSC -- and it was overwhelming. There were tons of labels I didn’t understand (index coverage?!?), hidden filters, and confusing graphs. Of course, the more I used it, the less confusing it became. But if you want to skip the learning curve (and why wouldn’t you), good news: I’m going to reveal everything I’ve learned about how to use Google Search Console like a pro. This guide covers: Adding your website to...

How to Successfully Migrate a Website Without Harming SEO An outdated website won't represent your brand well. Web design experts recommend a site redesign every 2-3 years to keep up with web standards and design trends. This can often be accomplished with a simple facelift or re-skin. However, in some cases, you may be up against a site migration. The end result of a site migration may include a cleaner interface, a new or improved user experience, an easier editing experience, and more. However, the choice to migrate your website should not be taken lightly. If executed poorly, you could end up with status code errors, negatively impacted SEO performance, and even irritated website visitors. Why might you migrate a website? Here are the circumstances in which you might need a site migration over a simple redesign: You need to move your site's location from one server to another. You are changing the CMS platform your site operates on. You are changing your domain name or URLs. You need to make major changes to your site's architecture (not just aesthetics). Website migrations can be done on your own or professionally. (For example, HubSpot offers migration services to customers switching to HubSpot's CMS.) If you're considering a website migration, keep in mind that you must leave yourself time to prepare and execute. Migration specialists usually take about three weeks, so plan accordingly. Now, let's get into the details of migrating a website....

How to Prevent Redirect Chains from Destroying Your SEO Have a website? Then you’ve likely heard about search engine optimization (SEO) — the process of making your site easier to find, crawl, and rank for search engines. The better your SEO, the higher your website ends up on search engine ranking pages (SERPs) — as a result, the greater the chance of your site being noticed by potential customers. And with 68% of all website traffic coming from organic and paid searches — rather than through social media shares and other marketing channels — the right SEO strategy is critical. Many SEO techniques are straightforward: Don’t keyword stuff. Keep your content relevant. Improve your website’s user experience (UX) by cutting complexity and boosting speed. But other metrics also matter. Case in point? Redirect chains. These interconnected Internet issues cause problems for search engine spiders, frustration for users, and potential problems for your page ranking. But what exactly is a redirect chain? Why is it potentially problematic? And how do you find and remove these unintentional website course corrections? Here’s what you need to know. Learn about what web optimization is and how to do it with this free course.  What is a redirect chain? A redirect chain occurs when there’s more than one redirect between the initial link users click on and the eventual destination page. There are two common types of redirects: 301 and 302. 301 redirects happen when the destination page permanently links to a new...

The Simplified Guide to Google's RankBrain Algorithm Not long ago, if you wanted to find a place to eat, you needed to search for a term like “Boston restaurants”. But, today, you can instantly find a good restaurant that’s nearby if you just search for the term, “Where should I go for dinner?” That’s because Google is sophisticated enough to recognize your intent or the implications of your query. However, prior to 2015, you needed to type the most straightforward queries into the search engine to find the answers you were looking for. So how did Google evolve to understand their searchers’ intent and implications so quickly? Well on October 26, 2015, they confirmed that they updated their algorithm with a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called RankBrain. In other words, RankBrain helps Google understand a searcher’s intent and serve the most relevant content to them. How Does Google's RankBrain Work? As explained above, RankBrain was designed for the searcher's experience in mind, particularly when it comes to understanding the intent and relationships behind seemingly complex searches.  In order to better explain this functionality, we break down how RankBrain works in conjunction with Google's algorithm as a whole: RankBrain and Other Ranking Signals Before RankBrain, Google used a number of ranking signals to determine: Relevance to the searcher's query The authority of a particular website and page to provide a trustworthy answer User experience so that the searcher would have their needs met in an enjoyable way and without...

Google Cache: How to View Cached Pages Cached pages is an undeniably useful tool when you come across a web page that is performing poorly, or temporarily down for some reason. At its most basic, Google crawls web pages and then makes raw HTML copies of them -- a cached page. This can enable you to view a website that is slow or not responding, and it can also help SEO experts figure out indexation issues with a site. What is a cached page? A cached page is a backup of the raw HTML and content of a page taken at a single point in time to be stored on a server and retrieved later.  For example, when Google crawls a web page, it will take a screenshot of that page and index the content for future reference. Additionally, Google will provide the date of the last time the page was indexed on the cache page, i.e. "This page is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Feb 20, 2020". If you've come across a page that isn't responding, or if you want to make sure your site is being properly indexed, keep reading to figure out how cached pages can help you solve both. How to View Cached Pages In Google's search box, type the website or page you're trying to see. Beside the URL, click the down arrow. Select "Cached". You...

What is a Web Crawler? (In 50 Words or Less) I don't know about you, but I wouldn't describe myself as a "technical" person. In fact, the technical aspects of marketing are usually the hardest ones for me to conquer. For example, when it comes to technical SEO, it can be difficult to understand how the process works. But it's important to gain as much knowledge as we can to do our jobs more effectively. To that end, let's learn what web crawlers are and how they work. You might be wondering, "Who runs these web crawlers?" Well, usually web crawlers are operated by search engines with their own algorithms. The algorithm will tell the web crawler how to find relevant information in response to a search query. A web crawler will search and categorize all web pages on the Internet that it can find and is told to index. This means that you can tell a web crawler not to crawl your web page if you don't want it to be found on search engines. To do this, you'd upload a robots.txt file. Essentially, a robots.txt file will tell a search engine how to crawl and index the pages on your site. So, how does a web crawler do its job? Below, let's review how web crawlers work. This means that a search engine's web crawler most likely won't crawl the entire Internet. Rather, it will decide the importance of each web page based on factors including...

How to Optimize Your Content for Google's Featured Snippet Box In the past few years Google have been refining the way that it displays results to users. In particular, Google has been increasing the number of Featured Snippets that it displays for queries. This actually pushes organic results further down the page. So what does that mean for SEOs? Well, that's what I set out to explore. Naturally, ranking in the Featured Snippet itself remedies the problem of positioning, but is this strategy something worth doing? What is a Featured Snippet, anyway? And more importantly, what do you have to do to appear there? What Is a Featured Snippet? Featured Snippets — also known as answer boxes — are selections of content displayed on the search engine results page (SERP) without the user having to visit the page where the content lives. Google puts these snippets above regular SERP results but below the ads in an effort of serving the user better. For example, the Featured Snippet below displays the direct instructions pulled from the tasteofhome.com web page. There are no ads for this query, so the Featured Snippet shown in the answer box is above position 1 of the SERPs for "how to make bread." The directions are shown in four steps before the user has to click a single link. Types of Featured Snippet Paragraph List Table Video Accordion Rich Answer...

What is a 301 Redirect, and When Should You Use One? I moved five times in the last year. And every single time I moved, I forgot to sign up to have my mail forwarded to my new address. Mail forwarding is an important step in any moving process, as it ensures you don't lose any valuable information that's sent to you. And the same can be said for your website: If you're moving a website from one URL to another, you need to take the necessary steps to ensure your visitors get sent to the right place. In the world of tech, this is called a 301 redirect. Here, we're going to discuss what a 301 redirect is and when you need to use one, as well as how to redirect a URL in HubSpot or WordPress. Additionally, we'll explore the differences between a 301 and 302 redirect. Let's dive in. What is a 301 redirect? 301 is a status code which a server sends to your browser. It is one of many possible status codes, some of which you've probably heard about (including 404 - Not Found, 403 - Forbidden and, 500 - Server Error). When you visit a webpage and the server sends the page normally, the status code it attaches to that page is 200 - OK. You can think of a 301 redirect like a mail forwarder. Once you've moved a piece of content away from a specific URL, anyone who tries to visit...

What is a 301 Redirect, and When Should You Use One? I moved five times in the last year. And every single time I moved, I forgot to sign up to have my mail forwarded to my new address. Mail forwarding is an important step in any moving process, as it ensures you don't lose any valuable information that's sent to you. And the same can be said for your website: If you're moving a website from one URL to another, you need to take the necessary steps to ensure your visitors get sent to the right place. In the world of tech, this is called a 301 redirect. Here, we're going to discuss what a 301 redirect is and when you need to use one, as well as how to redirect a URL in HubSpot or WordPress. Additionally, we'll explore the differences between a 301 and 302 redirect. Let's dive in. What is a 301 redirect? 301 is a status code which a server sends to your browser. It is one of many possible status codes, some of which you've probably heard about (including 404 - Not Found, 403 - Forbidden and, 500 - Server Error). When you visit a webpage and the server sends the page normally, the status code it attaches to that page is 200 - OK. You can think of a 301 redirect like a mail forwarder. Once you've moved a piece of content away from a specific URL, anyone who tries to visit...