I am wondering if any of you have good knowledge about the effect of indexed pages and PR when a site changes servers. I am thinking up pulling up roots on one of my sites and moving it to a new server, but since it has good standings in Google, I don't want to risk any damage to it. Anmy thoughts on the issue?
Hi I am in the middle of it at the moment, leaving 1 and 1 to go and rot!! Its a pain in the ass and Yahoo and Google have both dropped one of my sites, but I have noticed that Yahoo have got me back on and it seems its a lot stronger than before - early days though. I am also going from a German located server to a UK based one and as I am targeting UK searches I have heard this may help a little, who knows? It also caught my out going to a cpanel. great bit of kit but different to what I am used to as I uploaded my site to / rather than /xxxxxxx_html/ I did not read the FAQ's I must admit that my new host www.wesh.co.uk is great, I speak to the MD on messenger when I have a problem or speak to him on the phone and he cant do enough to help. There is no over selling and its not a cheap option but the quality of the hosting is superb. Good luck if you move it the best but most worring thing I have done in a long time. Jamie
I personally have never experienced any negative effects that I know of due to changing host or servers. This includes indexed pages and PR. If there were any changes they were small enough that I didn't notice.
I'm in the process right now of moving all my sites to new IPs and new hardware on a different network. I actually saw my rankings go up, but we'll see how it turns out after the dust settles.
I cannot back this up with evidence (wish I could) but I noticed drastic serp improvements when moving websites from some of my dev boxes in Asia to my other boxen in the US. Food for thought I guess.
It has been proven that site location (which country its in) does effect SERPs a lot. SEs look at the IP and where it's located and that's a factor in the display of SERPs, so moving to a USA location would dramatically help your SERPs if that was your target market. If you were targeting Asia, then you would lose SERPs by moving out of Asia.
Let's see what Matt Cutts has to say about it http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/
All very interesting. I have never experienced any negative change in mine. So will be interesting to see what happens with your move now.
Well, I read matt's blog, and I will follow those instructions. I plan to make the move in the next few days. i will keep the post updated to how things go.
I have done this several times over the years. I have seen no discernable impact because all I did change the IP address for the domains. However, I have always allowed for an overlap period of a couple of weeks to make sure the change is recorded by search engines and that I am not gettting missed in their latest update. Basically, I do not hand in my one months notice until the next host has been contracted and the next server is online and I can start moving files from one site to the next. I always allow a week for the move and then take extra steps to keep the two in sync while the IP address change is propagating. During the last week I change the old server to display a page telling stragglers about the IP address change.
you just want to make sure that the search engines are not update when your doing it can cause problems if your site is down during this time. though it should get back in rank right away. never want to keep your site down to long
All you have to do is to upload the files to the new server, then change the DNS. If you are using a database-oriented site, have the old server use the database server on the new server, then you won't have any problems.
I know how to do it. I have done it many times. I am just curious of the effects of search engine standings and results after the site is on a new IP address. Thanks to all for the comments
Having just done this myself, I didnt see too many negative effects, other then a slight transition down time. But really nothing to write home about. Havent noticed any negative effects on serps yet. Brad
We moved one of our sites that is in the top 50,000 of alexa cross country with no problems. There were not changes in any SERPs.
There should not be any problems. also, you can keep a copy of your site on your old server for few days till you are sure googlebot is hitting your new servers
Then no, I haven't noticed any negitave effects. But, I only moved from Utah to Washington, and from a shared IP to a dedicated IP.