Changing web hosts - does it affect SEO?

Hey guys -- if I change hosting companies for my site... what kind of effect will that have on my rankings?

 

If the transition is seamless then you shouldn't notice any effect.

 

As long as you don't let your site go offline you shouldn't have any problems at all

 

Thanks guys!

 

Hey one more question -- if I change all of the extensions of my filenames to, say, PHP, instead of what they are now -- does THAT have an effect on rankings?

Hehe... hope my questions aren't too remedial!

 

Yes it will.

Your filename changes, so all the old pages that were in the Google index, are no longer there. Your pagerank on those pages are no longer there either.

I'd strongly recomend not changing the extension once you have your site ranking well.

If you are using HTML right now, and need/want to parse PHP in the pages, you can always use .htaccess to force .html (or any other, for that matter) to be parsed by PHP.


Josh

 

Change your HTML pages into "content/info pages" that lead to the new php pages- if possible.

 

I recently changed my host from Windows to Linux and had to change the file extensions from ASP to PHP. The new pages don't have any PR becuse the extensions are changed but they were indexed by google very quickly and are also showing up in SERPs.

Zeb

 

ahh... cool. anyone else have any experiences like this? I really wanna switch to PHP... I'm not #1 yet so I'm thinking if I'm gonna do it, I better do it now.

And all of the backlink work I've been doing points to my plain URL -- not a filename or anything... not sure if that matters.

 

If a SE goes to your site looking for 'example.html' and it's not there it will get a 404.

So you'll need to use mod_rewrite to alter your URL's.

If you've never used .htaccess and mod_rewrite, you might want to have someone do this for you. It's not something you should do w/ trial and error.

 

I have a custom 404 error page having updated links to all my new pages so I think that should'nt be an issue.

 

a '404' is a '404' to a Search Engine. You need to re-direct your old pages, not just link them to the new ones.

 

Ahan. So that means using a 301 redirect for the old pages will do the trick ? Thanks for tip

 

Even if you do theres no problem. The search engines will just have a non-existant page in the cache for the time its down.

 

Its not a huge problem though. Just setup a custom 404 page in your htaccess file to redirect visitors to your new pages when they click on non existant pages in the SERPs. Your new pages will retain their old positions when they get indexed.

 

Wrong, wrong, wrong! A custom 404 is not a good solution for retaining SE rankings.

New pages are new pages and have nothing to "retain".

 

Why is that so?

Apart from being different file extensions, what are different about the old/new pages? They will have exactly the same content and retain the same link popularity and internal linking structure? I am not saying you will begin to rank immediately, of course not, but give it about a month or so for the new pages to get indexed properly and you should be good to go. No?

 

I got indexed by google within a week time after changing my file extensions. 404 works fine for me and my ranking is still the same

 

You went from ASP to PHP...that might be different.

Did you lose a week's worth of SE listings?

 

It's up to you obviously. Some businesses don't want any "down time".

If I lost a month's worth of SE referrals, I would be out over $100K.

It depends on the site. If you switch from HTML to PHP, chances are that there are a lot of differences.