from the title itself.. does changing host will affect my search engine rank position?? i know there are already lots of thread like this but i want updated answers.. Please help me.. I'm planning to move to another host since i'm runnning out of bandwidth.. Thanks
there ha been an identical thread just days ago there is nothing that has changed on that topic in the past 2-3 years !
No it doesnt. But.... When you are moving it and the site goes down it can effect it. Make sure you have your site on the new host before you change DNS. A site being down for a day and if Google visits frequently it could effect you. But most likely it wont.
No Your PR will not be effected as it is of your URL domain. If your site is down while crawler attempted to visit. It will effect your PR.
@wahabltd - i'm not asking with the PR. I'm asking for the SERP. aaron_nimocks - thanks for the response.. anyway.. everything is clear now to me..
Simple answer, no. However many different factors could effect the search results. Make sure you stay hosting in the same geographical region, if you were hosting in the US and then moved to a server in Canada you can see changes in your search results. Also, as another poster stated you might see issues with down time. The simple way to prevent that is to setup your new hosting and get the site all setup; use the preview button in the control panel to make sure it's working. Then switch over the dns servers in your registrar and wait 72 hours before deactivating your old hosting.
If your site is offline for a long time, then you can lost all your search results rankings. This happened to me, I was ranking 1st but my site was offline for 48 hours because of host change, and I lost all my ranking. I suggest you do the host change fast.
angilina, that just happen to me. My server was down for a day and now i lost my ranking. I lost all the ranking forever? has regained your position after some days?
as far as i am aware colocation of the server can affect your SERPs, for example if you were on a UK hosted server you would have better result on google.co.uk than google.com and vice versa if you on a US colocated host.
Yes and no, it can have an effect but you can still rank properly in another geographical location. Using every possible method to increase your chances is always a plus.
This is what Google says: "As long as your URL stays the same, your site's listing in Google shouldn't be affected if you switch hosting companies or change your IP address." Source http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34437&ctx=sibling
Your site should remain steady in the event of switching hosts, with the exception that as alluded to before, server uptime could affect it or possibly on a longer term scale, perhaps your old host had uptime of 99.9% but this new one has uptime of 95.0% - If you are in a real competitive niche could possibly affect it or if you had a unique i.p. before but move to one that has a lot of "bad neighborhood" sites on it, or some other random problem it could theoretically affect it but generally speaking you should be fine. Also worth noting is the advice given earlier to make sure the hosting is in the same country unless you are purposely trying to shift your country focus as SERP results can vay widely, geographically speaking. I touched on the issue in a previous SEO article on my SEO blog. The article is mainly about domain name extensions and how your rankings in various geographical location are different but your hosts location can also similarly affect your rank.
I am hosting with HostBreak, i saw improvement in my ranking it is comming up day by day. I will suggest you to choose HostBreak to move your rank up. To contact them visit their webside which is www.hostbreak.com. I hope this will help you alot regarding everything.
Google may claim it won't affect but I've seen a lot of case studies showing different, along with one of my own sites. When I changed to Australian hosting, the proportion of Australian visitors significantly increased.