TTL is the abbreviation for Time To Live. Normally, this is seldom, if ever, heard of, outside of a small number of web masters. If you are losing your SERPS by great amounts, 50, 100, or 100’s each day, chances are, if you have changed to a new server recently, you may have a problem with your TTL’s being set low.
Sometimes the serps positions can drop by hundreds, pick up a few hundred places, then drop by twice as much again. It is a confusing, bewildering and scary time.
TTL’s can mean two different things it seems. TTL can be defined as the number of hops / routers that your web site is allowed go through, before it is extinguished. So, if you had a setting of 3, after the web page went through the third router it would be killed off.
Anyone within 3 hops of your server can see your page, any one after cannot.
Apparrently TTL can also be set to minutes, rather than hops, but essentailly it means when a certain time has passed the site is killed at the router when it goes over time.
Now, you can see why a search engine doesn’t like displaying sites with low TTL in its search results, when many people may not be able to see the site - it looks like the search engine may not be that good, and it frustrates the person trying to access your site, they can’t see it, so they hit the back button and try clicking again.
Hence during your first month of low TTL’s, your visitor numbers will likely seem to rise to perhaps record levels. It hasn’t really, it’s just that people are downloading your page repeatedly when trying to get to it.
But why did I refer to TTL as short for Thief Thief Look! ? Because, criminal based web sites use low TTL’s.
Why low TTL’s? Because, when you are going to move to a new server, you need to have low TTL’s for the change of servers.
Now, every bona-fide site that changes to a new server goes through low TTL’s for a short time. Once they get to the new server successfully, the TLL’s are increased again.
BUT, criminal type sites keep their TTL’s low for a quick transfer to another server. It’s like leaving the car running when you go to rob a bank.
So search engines also look darkly on low TTL’s for that reason as well.
If you are unlucky enough to have had your TTL settings put on low and left there by your host provider, after about a week or a month, you will definitely start seeing your keywords dropping dead around you like flies.
At first you will think the loss of serps has something to do with what you did on site, so you’ll check all changes, then you’ll check your links, for any that may have gone bad. You’ll make changes because Blind Freddy reckons it’s too many links, too many keywords, but no matter what you do, the serps just keep plumetting.
If more than one site went to the new server, you will find that they too will drop in serps. Interestingly, they don’t all seem to drop at the same time or rate I’ve found, and it may not be all your keywords that dropping, just some, but the longer the TTL’s are left low, the more keywords become adversly affected.
When a bona fide site is left with low TTL’s it suggest that the move to a new server went somehow wrong, and the rush to fix the transfer meant that the TLL settings were forgot about as a result.
Once you become aware that your sites appear to have been affected by low TTL settings, you need to contact your host provider, let them know that since the change of server you have been losing serps positions greatly, and ask them if they could plase check and correct any and let you know.