Could anyone offer any personal testimony regarding the feasibility of purchasing a developed website, transferring it to another host, and changing the contact and billing information? My concern is the notion that the major search engines monitor factors such as IP address changes, contact information changes, billing information changes, and domain transfers. Is it possible to change these settings after buying a high SERP ranking website and expect the site to continue to be successful? Horror stories such as lost PR and lost SERP rankings are can be read in this forum, but I'd like some solid testimony. I believe that this is an important issue for anyone who is considering making a high risk investment of this type, and I would really appreciate some professional advice about this before I make a buying decision. Thanks.
I have changed hosts many times, I have changed DNS info, I have changed my sites IP addresses. I have never seen any negative reactions from SE's resulting from the changes. If your concerned you could always change one thing at a time, wait a week or so, and change something else. I cant see a site being penalized for changing servers, IP or DNS information. But, if you are transferring the existing site to a new domain, its a completely different story.
Changing hosts and IP's + Whois changes has never gotten penalty. However, if the domain expires, and it is dropped and then registered again it does loose it's value and takes a lot more time to get reindexed and get PR.
Make sure that you 100% deactivate the old account once the DNS is fully propagated. Otherwise you could have a situation where the crawlers are using the old site's IP address which makes it look like two different sites with duplicate content. -jay
Thanks for the input folks, these comments come as a mild surprise to me. I had heard that whenever a site changes owners, and the corresponding DNS information changes, that the Google "new site filter" is reset.
No. That is absolutely NOT true. Like jestep, I have changed hosts, servers, IP addresses more than once with no problem in Google or other SEs.
This filter actually happens for domains that expired (which also leads to their pagerank expiring). Of course, with some cleverness (and the right registrar) you can keep the rankings (and the pagerank).
AhmedF- Can you please give more information on how this can be done? I read this at Ask Dave Taylor: His post doesnt give any real evidence, but I've read this at several different seo resources.I just bought a handful of expired domains(some with PR, some without) hoping to avoid any "new site" penalties from Google . Thanks
Well, its usually nothing inside your direct control. For those that dont know how the system works, once a domain expires, it goes into redemption. It then goes into pending delete, and then is deleted. The domain then becomes available, and many different competing services will attempt to register the domain first. So the above process had two distinct groups - the domain registrars, and the domain catching services. Well, in some situations, the two are the same and/or have partnerships with each other. In this manner, the domain never really hits pending delete! Once the redemption period is over, the registrar/catch service renews the domain, and then puts it up for auction/sale. This way, as far as google or any other search engine is concerned, the domain never 'expired' (its WHOIS information did change but the date created remained the same). This way a domain can keep its PR and even backlinks. Now you and the whole world knows
Yep, that's the only way that I know of that Google penalizes you for...IP's, hosting company, registrar and such really don't affect your ranking at all....
Thanks Ahmed. I let about 30 of my domains expire last year and I wondering how they got registered on the same day. Do you know the names of the offending registrars?
Well, its not that simple. The drop catching industry is very large. Almost all the registrars are involved in drop catches somehow. In regards to registrars who don't even let the domains drop - there are quite a few large ones, including (if I remember correctly) NetworkSolutions and GoDaddy.
Things what will sandbox or penilize a domain: 1 - Expiration 2 - Theme Change (entire site theme change)