Does moving a site affect rankings?

I've been getting lousy service from the company who hosts one of my sites, which happens to have excellent rankings for all my keywords. I'm pondering moving it to a new host but I'm concerned with losing my rankings once the I.P. Address is different.

Obviously all the URL's and everything won't change, but I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with this and if you saw any changes once you switched servers.

Thanks again,

Ian

 

As far as I know... It can only effect your ranking if the new IP is located in another country.

 

If you run into problems like the site going down or the domain getting stuck in the transfer process it can screw you up. The SEs are pretty forgiving about this and it usualy self-corrects in about a week.

 

I reckon you will be OK, search engines can't penalize us for everything

 

<stirring the pot>Why not?</stirring the pot>

 

That's good to know. I'm in one of those situations where I have to decide do I continue to suffer through this and keep my rankings and traffic and as a result at least keep the sales I am getting? Or do I move to a server that won't go down but instead have no sales and no traffic after losing my rankings?

It's been a tough few weeks, and I appreciate your feedback to far. If anyone else as any experience with this I'd like to hear from you as I want to make absoultely sure there are no issues. One thing I will mention to respond to one of the previous posts is that the current host is in Australia, while the new one is US based. Will that have any affect?

Thanks again,

Ian

 

Rankings / traffic isn't affected by a hosting transfer (unless in a different country region of course). The only thing that could mess you up is downtime. Simply change hosts, copy the sites over to the new hosts and make sure everything is there and working fine, then change the DNS. Nobody will notice any downtime. If you run any database sites that get updates uncontrolled by you (like forums), then disable them prior to moving.

 

if your after a good Australian host, hit up sanitytech.net, tis where I'm hosted.

But since your transfering internationally, it could slide. Maybe that explains why my site has slid down since when I went from US to AUS.

 

When you move hosting countries the it can affect G serps, maybe Y and MSN too I don't know. I believe G likes to serve regionalized content.

 

That's what I'm worried about. I think the current company is based in Australia and the one I'm thinking about moving to is in the US. I'm just worried about losing rankings that took me a year to achieve, so this feedback certainly has me wondering.

Thanks for all the advice guys, I appreciate it. It's been extremely helpful.

Ian

 

My company transfers domains all the time - typically, the transfer doesnt lose any PR and doesnt seem to have any trouble.

 

I just recently move a site from a US based server to a server in Germany.

I copied the 'old' site, put it on the 'new' server , so there were two identical sites running. Then I changed the IP of www.domain.com, and traffic started to shif from old to new. That took a few days. It hasn't (yet) affected my rankings. Traffic from G, msn and Y! is the same as it was before.

But this was just 4 weeks ago. If it will affect my rankings now, I can't say it is because of the move, too many other things have been changed since then.

 

I have a site hosted in one country and I just transferred it to another, so if you want to hold on a few days I'll let you know what happens

 

I moved my site from lunarpages to another server at lunarpages, after they messed up the move and I was down for 6 hours I lost SEO, but I am hoping to get it back again.

 

Many Australian hosts have US based servers. Is your site actually in an Australian datacentre? You may already be hosted in the US.

 

Good question. I'll have to research that and find out. Thanks for all the info so far guys, it's been terrific

Ian