I hope this is the correct forum to post in. Does changing hosting provider (thus the server and IP is also changed) affects the website ranking on search engines? For example, let's say my website is hosted with my existing provider and it has PR4. Now, if I switch to another provider and another server and IP address, does this affect my website ranking?
Your confusing Page rank with serps. But the answer is no your Page Rank which is 4 wont change because of the host switch and nor will your search engine rankings, no matter what the new google claim about this issue, its not in effect.
Not a matter of hope. Hope or don't hope. It's all the same, as Yoda might say. Nothing will change except the DNS information. To spiders and human visitors alike, it's the same site in the same location, which is your URL.
Yep no change at all, I just moved my site to a new server. Nothing changed. Ranks remained same. Regards, Tuning
I can't imagine it changing, I have heard that google takes the IP into question when dealing with backlinks. Just because someone could own a network thousands of sites that link to each other with the same IP. Thus it wouldn't hold as much weight since they are all on the same IP. But in your case it wouldn’t matter.
Connect, you can prosecute bigtime if you see a change cuz it's not gonna happen. Like everybody said, a DNS change won't affect you in any way
Well, if google takes this into account and really gives it much importance then it's a total waste of time cuz there's so many ways to circumvent this issue...but i won't tell how
I disagree that it could play no role..... Generally, Google and other search engines know that it is sometimes nessassary to change hosting providers here and there. Things happen, companies go out of business, deals get better, etc.. BUT, things like IP address, IP location, should play some kind role with Google.... I doubt there would be any change in Yahoo and MSN, but I do think that Google looks very closely on things like this..... For instance, now just as a possibility..... Lets say, Google does a reverse IP check and finds out that one website is hosting on a machine by itself verses another website that is hosted on a shared machine with 18,000 other websites, have you ever thought that it could be possible that Google could value the dedicated site over the site on the shared server? Could be, we'll probably never know for sure..... But here is another example.... Lets say we have two huge New York sites JUST EXAMPLES: NewYork.com NewYorkUSA.com Now lets say a reverse IP comes up with this: SENARIO #1 NewYork.com - Web server hosts - 1 website IP Location: - Brooklyn - New York - USA - Cablevision SENARIO #2 NewYorkUSA.com - Web server hosts - 15,877 websites IP Location: - Glasgow - Scotland - UK - GallyWeb I have a feeling that servers and web hosting should be something you atleast give some serious thought to, but ofcource I could be wrong.....
Well actually these guys are right for the most part however if you don't adjust your meta-tags on the new server to be identical to to your old server then you will lose rank for sure.
No. I've never thought that and I don't believe it. There are way too many high ranking sites with virtual hosting on large servers... It would make no sense whatsover for Google to devalue a site for that reason.
I would venture to say that a change could happen based on a couple of factors, and they are just speculation and not search engine specific: 1) The speed of the server. If the speed dramatically improves or decreases the rank could be affected. 2) Bad server neighborhood: If the server IP class of either the old site or the new site is flagged as a spam generation area, this could affect the rankings. 3) Quality of Service: If the network regularly goes down, this could affect rankings - i.e. if you moved from or to a server hosted on a cable modem or in a very low quality data center. 4) Migration Quality: If a site migration is not clean and ends up producing a high number of 404's then this could be a problem. I'm sure there are some other points to be made, but really everything can be summarized by quality differentiation between the servers. A minor change in quality shouldn't affect things, and even a big increase in quality may not affect things, but a dramatic decrease in quality should affect rankings for the simple fact that the SE's want quality sites in the SERPs. I think I'm in agreement with most people that a server/host migration should not pose a problem. For the most part a server migration is to either a same or higher quality server. If the migration is clean, then there shouldn't be a problem, but the point I'm disagreeing on (or simply just pointing out) is that if you're migrating from a dedicated server to joe's free hosting don't be surprised if you end up with some quality issues that will affect your rankings. It may not - I don't have any data to support my speculation, but I'm just saying that there is a possibility.