Hello all I am on 3 dedicated servers at the moment, And I have google, yahoo, msn and other bots on my site all the time, But with this swap to a new datacenter, My site will be offline for 24 hours, Now I am no expert but would this not damage my SEO alot?
Do not care about that. It cannot damage your SEO Maybe just it can report some errors till next indexing. Anyway, do not worry because of that.
Moving to a new datacenter, I have to transfer 3 servers, 2 on raid. it takes a while, also I have to transfer over 100 hosted accounts.
why need to move all servers at once? You can move one by one, transfer hosting accounts over. That will help to reduce downtime
Well, I would do that but there are many reasons for me leaving my current host, and they are being very strict on how they allow me to do this. The way I have set all of my servers up, I will need / want to move them all at once, not doing so will only cause my more problems. I was just worried about my SEO but as that will not be damaged then I am very happy
I had some downtime on one of my sites for like 12-13 hours (due to explosion in datacenter where my servers were stored), and Google did try to crawl my site in the meantime, and reported some 404 errors in Google webmaster panel (like 15-16 404 errors although the whole site was not working during that time). That did not affect my SE positions at that time. One month has pass, and nothing has changed. I guess it will not affect your site/sites either. Good luck.
I have to, I have limited time with the planet at the moment, I am not at all happy with them. Moving to softlayer.com
I used to worry about the same problem but I prove myself that I'm just being paranoid. Change of IP used to create a negative effects with Google ranking (from what I read, but had not experienced before) but not now anymore.
The best way to do it is keep your current servers, move accounts, change dns, wait about 72 hours, cancel old account. Then there's no downtime.