Aaron Shear

If you keep up with my posts on Search Engine Watch, you will notice that I regularly talk about how site performance can be a significant driver in SEO, especially with Google. Many large companies take this data for granted; they are worried about up time and browser performance. Which in most cases is a good thing, however a search engine like Google may be testing your response rate and attempting to predict your level of capacity. In both IIS and Apache it is possible to throttle a search engine so it crawls at a lower level. In most cases this application or module may produce a 500 server busy error. Search engines interpret this as an end user experience and may limit the number of pages and or keywords that may rank at the same time. This practice ensures users commonly find an active page when they click on a listing. How fast are your servers?