Ubuntu webserver (LAMP) for google (sad story)
 

Let me tell you a little story...

My server has always been a small LAMP based on ubuntu, and first there was varnish, and everything was quite nice... then https and no more varnish...

With varnish gone, visits to my websites from search engines (Google) were greatly affected, I tried to compensate by optimizing the server... Memcached, Apcu, Opchache, mod_headers mod_expires in htaccess, and cache in web page headers.

My sites have become very light, very fast, wonderfully usable, my website pages instantly appeared out of nowhere in a magical poof!

But visits and earnings have collapsed, at the worst moment $30 a month...

I blamed the search engine, not my perfectly and wonderfully configured little server...

Then one day something happened, I had to completely reinstall a new server, and given the few results and earnings I didn't want to start reconfiguring a perfect server... I put a LAMP online without too many pretensions, and without any cache.. .

And visits from search engines have returned... and with them earnings in a few months have gone from $30 a month to $1500-2000 a month at the best time, now around $6-700 a month...

But the doubt has always remained, basically I just removed the caches, now my websites are slower and heavier, but somehow google likes them more now...

Is there anything else I can do on my server to make google like my websites, even if it goes against all obvious and reasonable logic?

Has anyone else unfortunately had stories like mine and perhaps discovered other optimizations or configurations on Ubuntu servers (or LAMP in general) that annoy Google?

Since you don't tell us what this server is hosted on, running what versions of any of the needed software, what it's hosting, how much it's hosting, or even the version of Ubuntu, what do you think we'll be able to tell you??

Hi

You can see details with a SEO checker. There are lots of them - some online, like this one:

https://pagespeed.web.dev/

The report is long, but you can click for explanation. The SEO score is used for page ranking. They don't see your backend, but the time for responses is important.

Years have passed... different server, different hosting, new version of ubuntu, php, mysql, etc, etc, etc... always ubuntu LAMP...

My websites reach 100% on pagespeed and lighthouse with all caches active, they shot off fireworks when I did the tests... but then Google basically didn't send any visits...



My response time is unfortunately high when Google scans thousands of pages in a day, low on days of normal operation, the cause is the few server resources, but I can't buy more resources, because with the visits that he sends me I don't I earn enough...

One of the stupidest things google does... it comes into my server hundreds of thousands of times to scan all my pages at once and overloads my server, so its scans show that my websites are slow. ..

I've tested my websites thousands of times to make sure I'm up to date with the March updates and the introduction of nip, and the other day Google took away 90% of my visits...

https://i.ibb.co/QXHgzqB/Screenshot-...2-23-43-24.png

https://i.ibb.co/YBxTDGr/Screenshot-...2-23-43-49.png

An example, this website lost 90% of its visits the other day, but it doesn't seem to have any problems on the SEO side, so I'm looking for something that can annoy Google on the server side...

And you STILL don't tell us anything about your system now, so again: what do you think we'll be able to tell you??? We have zero idea if this is running on a laptop in your bedroom over your house DSL connection, or if you've got a hosted server with a ton of resources.

Regardless, your main complaint seems to be with Google. Have you actually tried to CONTACT Google about this??

Many versions have changed over the years, both of ubuntu and of all software... so the question is not related to a specific version, but to a behavior or configuration of a web server regardless of versions or resources.

Probably in any version or in any server if I were to reinstall all the caches, Google would take away all the visits again...

CONTACT Google? :D:D:D:D:D:D

So again...you refuse to tell us any details. And either this is a new problem or has been a problem for years...and you refuse to say which. So again; what do you think we'll be able to tell you??? Should we continue to guess???
"Reinstall the caches"??? Search engines do that upstream, and either you're getting hits or you're not...which is it???
Yes...not sure why that's somehow funny, since there are a LOT of things you can do as a website administrator to contact Google about incorrect results, slow updates, etc. Did you bother to try to look that up???

Hi alebalweb,

A cache is used to speed up your machine's delivery of webpages. I assume that you know that the server's resources - such as a machine that runs on a hard disk drive vs. an SSD - the SSD machine will potentially respond faster.

If there are differences between the machines you are running your server on - the differences in hardware could in fact be making a difference in the delivery time. So, it is hard to tell if just removing a cache versus having better hardware is the situation that is contributing to your dilemma.

- 6th