500 errors and impact on google rankings

[ahw]

Since the launch of our newly designed website about 6 months ago, we are experiencing a high number of 500 server errors (>2000).

Attempts to resolve these errors have been unsuccessful to date. We have just started to notice a consistent and sustained drop in rankings despite our hard sought efforts to correct.

Two questions... can very high levels of 500 errors adversely effect our google rankings?

And, if this is the case,  what type of specialist (what are they called) has expertise to investigate and fix this issue.

I should also mention that the sitemap also goes down on a regular basis, which some have stated is due to the size of the site (>500 pages). Don't know if they're part of the same problem?

Thanks.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Ryan,

I suggest creating a new Q&A question for your specific question, and include what details you can about the errors you are seeing and the URL of your site, if you can.

[gradedstakes]

I'm having a similar issue. I take it this means that I need to move off Godaddy hosting and use something more advanced? Is this a correct way to resolve the issue?

[AlanMosley]

Your sitemap is returning a application/xml content type, this should be text/xml

and your 500 errors are

The URI you submitted has disallowed characters

See more details in email

[ShaMenz]

Hi ahw,

A 500 Server Error is generally caused by one of two things:

1. A hardware error in the server itself
2. A software error - something in the code which causes the server to barf

From your description, it sounds like the 500 errors may be appearing intermittently - ie a page is Ok, then errors, then is Ok etc.... This would tend to suggest that the problem is a hardware fault, but it is still possible that it may be caused by random code which is not encountered every time a page is loaded.

The most reliable way to determine which problem you have is to check whether you are experiencing the 500 errors with a static file - ie an image, video, pdf, xml, css etc. If you are seeing the error with a static file, then the problem is 100% Server hardware fault (or Server misconfiguration, but this should return a permanent 500 Error).

If "the sitemap also goes down on a regular basis", means that your sitemap also is intermittently returning a 500 Error and it is a static xml file, that may be your clue.

If yours is a LAMP based system (Apache/Linux) and you have root access to your Server, my boss is a Systems Administrator and able to take a look at it for you, but his gut feeling is that you are looking at a hardware problem. This means your best course of action would be to contact your Hosting provider as soon as possible and ask them to take a look at it.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[josh-riley]

I agree with Alan.

As for the sitemap, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "goes down on a regular basis" - as in # of pages indexed by Google? And if some of those URLs are part of the 500 error list, then it makes sense that the # of pages Google indexed would go down as if Google can't index a page then it doesn't matter if it's listed in the sitemap as it can't be crawled.

[AlanMosley]

Yes 500 errors will affect ranking, SE like a site that is well mainated, obviosly they dont want to send users to a error page.

Can we get a url, I will take a look, and may be able to advice you.