Well, today I will explain to you a little details on how search engines work and how knowing about this “secret” can help your blog grow 2-3 times.

When I first started blogging, my blog was on a shared server with about 10 other sites.  After my blog got “digged” several times, I had more visitors than my server could handle.  So I did upgrade it to a dedicated server.

Now, what’s so special about upgrading to a dedicated server?

Well, let me first tell you the “secret” behind search engines.

You see, search engines “crawl” your site and index your pages based on the different words, keywords, etc…etc…

Now if the search engine can “crawl” your site within 1-3 seconds, you are probably okay.  But if you are on a shared server and it takes more than 3 seconds to “crawl” your site, the search engine will not come back to your site as often and your pages won’t get indexed as fast and some pages will come up missing.

What you need to do is make sure your site is always at 25% of full capacity on the server.

So if your daily traffic is like 500 uniques, it should be able to handle at least 2,000 uniques.

Search engines WILL crawl your site much more efficiently and send you more traffic only if your server can handle it.

If you are on a shared server and it take the search engines 10 seconds to “crawl” your site, they are not going to want to send you traffic because your site will be very very slow and cannot handle more traffic.

You see, Google’s branding is about bringing the “fastest” information to you.  Now if someone searched for something and the site loads very very slow, that’s going to look bad on Google.

Of course, you need the content first and foremost, but after that, it’s all about SPEED.

That’s the worst kept secret that no book will teach you and you won’t understand unless you’ve experienced it.

It’s logical and common sense.  Now, go apply it on your blog and start receiving 2-3 times more traffic simply because your server can handle more traffic.

What do you need to do?

You need to forsee how much traffic you will be getting over the next 1-3 months.  If your server slows down a lot, it’s time for hardware upgrade.  If you don’t upgrade, you will lose valuable visitors.

I’ve been using Spotplex ever since their launch about a year ago.  A popular widget/digg like service, Spotplex announced yesterday (or today officially), it’s going offline for good.

Couple weeks ago, I tried to access Spotplex, the site wouldn’t load.

Yesterday, I tried to access Spotplex, the site loaded with a message saying Spotplex will be gone.
Today, I tried to access Spotplex, they now have a single HTML landing page like this:

We regret to inform you that Spotplex is going offline. This was a very hard decision for us and we are sure you will miss the service as much as we do.

If you are interested in our assets or in knowing more on the shutdown of Spotplex, you can reach us at support@spotplex.com

Thanks for your support.

The Spotplex Team

Condolences

Note: If you have embedded a Spotplex tracking code on your site, please remove it. You might get an error message if you still have it beyond 5/9.

I have been checking their traffic stats and they did great at launch but failed to keep it going.

I suspect their failure has something to do with failure of thinking about site revenue and viral marketing.

Although a great service (it used to be), here’s my condolences.

I wish they had kept the site running though, probably wouldn’t take more than 1 dedicated server at this point.

assets, condolences, couple weeks, dedicated server, digg, error message, failure, landing page, launch, Social Networking, thanks for your support, traffic stats, viral marketing