Created on Thursday, 14 April 2011 19:41
Published Date
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Click and you’re there. In a connected world we all rely on being able to…well, connect. On the go my Blackberry allows me to update Twitter and Twitter is linked to my Facebook profile. I can also see what my Facebook contacts are posting and Skype Chat is also available to me while on the go.
When
Facebook went down a few months back it caused a major outcry as too many people suddenly found themselves with more offline time than they comfortably knew what to do with any more and suddenly the thought of face-to-face conversations became a terrifying possibility . A little more seriously though, the moment Facebook went down it also caused issues on website’s SEO, as Google had a problem indexing inaccessible pages and links, it created chaos in people’s online social interactions and caused a break in ongoing business contacts and online social marketing.
Now Skype has done the same. In an outage which is the first since 2007 the online VoiP website which recently celebrated the fact that it had reached a new milestone with
25 million people online at the same time Skype has managed to suddenly isolate people across the globe and affect business communications which have come to rely on the low-cost Voip service for most customer phone calls.
Online business has managed to make many services cheaper and easier to access and has, as a result, managed to reach a broad audience across many countries as Skype so aptly illustrates but, at the same time, it has created vulnerabilities as an outage in one service can now affect millions of people across the globe.
The lessons learnt here are that if you are really serious about your online business you need to put in place back-up and redundancy procedures designed to help it sustain its level of service even when near-catastrophic events occur in its normal service delivery channels. This is a philosophy which also serves you well when it comes to designing your website’s SEO strategy. Overly relying on a specific channel or service only serves to create vulnerabilities which leave you exposed.
