The phenomenon we encountered on January 8, 2026 was different from previous times. In the past, managing and maintaining a website’s SEO during internet outages in Iran was not a difficult task, but this time it was completely different.
But what happened this time? Why were all optimized websites affected by this outage?
Several factors in the internet outages in Iran that we witnessed were the duration, which previously did not last more than a week, and the next factor was the type of outage, which from January 8, 2026 onward was completely different.
In this article, together with Ashkan Mostofi, we aim to examine this phenomenon and the solutions and effective methods to confront it from an SEO perspective.
This article is applicable for business owners who have invested in the field of digital marketing, especially website optimization, as well as specialists in this field.
As you witnessed from **January 8, 2026** onward, the internet in Iran gradually turned into a national internet.
Unlike previous routines, the duration of this outage lasted more than a week. Even now, as this article is being written, the internet is still accompanied by disruptions.
Unlike previous times, this time many websites were exposed to the destruction of website SEO, and some of them, according to the obtained statistics, completely lost their rankings.
But what was the reason?
In this article about Google website SEO during internet outages, we want to examine its factors.
In past years, in line with the implementation of the national project requested by the Ministry of Communications and also the country’s computer صنوف, businesses changed and transferred their servers from خارج of the country to داخل of the country.
This was so that in case of an internet outage and the unveiling of the national internet, websites would remain accessible.
At that time, many websites changed their foreign hosts to Iranian hosts.
In this case, during an internet outage, only websites whose hosting was outside Iran were not accessible and displayable during the national internet.
But all domestic and foreign websites were accessible from outside Iran.
For this reason, websites that were optimized did not face problems, except for minor technical disruptions and similar issues.
But why did this time a fundamental blow hit the body of SEO-optimized websites?
This time we were faced with a phenomenon that was completely different from previous times.
As explained earlier, in previous instances only websites whose hosting was outside Iran went offline.
And from outside the country, all websites were accessible.
But this time we encountered a phenomenon as if websites hosted inside the country were hidden from outside the country.
Meaning that from outside the country, no one could access domestic websites, except for a limited number of websites such as news agencies.
From a technical point of view, any lack of access is displayed with a specific error.
From outside the country, we observed domestic websites with a 5xx range error.
A 5xx range error indicates عدم access to the server or host.
Of course, this issue was resolved after 18 days, and gradually websites became accessible from outside the country, but those same 18 days were enough for websites with excellent SEO to lose their rankings — but why?
Websites that are popular with Google are, first of all, those that have good speed.
Achieving excellent speed for a website consists of a set of technical activities that are applied to a website, which is called website optimization or on-page SEO.
Website speed has two advantages: one for visitors, as it allows them to easily review different pages of the website.
And the second advantage is for Google, as it allows Google crawlers to easily review and register website pages.
In addition to this, the more dynamic and active a website is, and the more popular it is with Google, the more the crawlers operate on the website, which in turn causes content to be indexed faster in Google and changes to be seen more quickly.
Such a situation is not easily achievable, and the SEO team must put in a lot of effort for this matter.
But this work, which is the result of hours of effort as well as significant experience and technical skill, acted in reverse in this phenomenon.
All websites that were popular with Google and whose crawlers checked them daily, when they went offline, the crawler checks caused their pages to be removed from Google more quickly.
Because apparently, due to the 5xx range error, Google assumed that the website had been removed, and therefore removed its content as well.
Well, this issue dealt an extremely heavy blow to website SEO, especially premium websites.
Websites that crawlers did not visit very often, due to their lack of activity, did not experience significant ranking changes for this reason.
Itroz Digital Agency is always striving to provide the best services to its customers and related individuals; therefore, we decided to share our solution with all specialists.
In the event of such a phenomenon occurring again in the short term, it is better not to apply any special changes.
But in the long term, the best solution is changing the host from inside the country to outside the country.
With this change, all your activities for Google will be preserved, and the website will not be at risk of removal.
Although inside the country the website will not be accessible.
Of course, according to Itroz’s investigations, this matter is not 100% certain, because in our monitoring, despite the server being outside Iran, we observed traffic from inside Iran to websites, and reports were recorded in Google.
The conclusion we reached during this period regarding the impact of this new phenomenon on our clients’ projects is that in the long term, you should definitely move the server out of Iran.
If you have any questions, share them with us in the comments section of this article.
Source » Itroz Academy
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