I just read on Ask Dave Taylor that it seems changing DNS info can affect your SERP. http://www.askdavetaylor.com/can_dns_changes_affect_search_engine_results_placement_serp.html This is exactly what happened to me 4 months ago! I was on page one for a dozen of my keywords, then changed to a new server, and BAM! ... dropped to page 5 and worse for everything. Does anyone know about recovery from this type of event? Does this practice seem reasonable? I know Google can do whatever it wants but this sure seems to be less than reasonable. Just because I want to upgrade the server my site runs on I have suffer a 60% decrease in traffic? Depressed
Did your backlinks change over that time? Because according to that article, it seems like an IP address change alone wouldn't necessarily trigger the drop, but a change in the registration data, like the owner's name, address, etc might. Was this a domain that you had recently purchased?
My backlinks didn't change but the registration data for my domain name did change; owner name, address, etc. The domain was owned by a friend and I finally decided to actually buy it off of him instead of having him host it for me. I bought the domain and moved it to one of my servers. 2 weeks later, big big drop. The domain name is not representative of the site content unfortunately but the site has been associated with that domain name for about 7 years so it would take a great deal of work to get all of the linkbacks moved to a new domain name, etc. j
Well, for me the theory about registration data change being a reason for the drop is unlikely. I have never heard about such correlation. Anyway, a drop while DNS change is not surprising for me. My explanation is that during DNS change, there is 24-48hrs period when for some people, and also for Googlebot, the site can be unaccessable. This maybe the reason for Google to drop your ranking for some time, because some links they follow just don't find your site. But after few days/weeks the situation should come back to normal.
theloans_org... I was thinking the same thing as far as the site potentially being seen as temporarily 'down' in Google's eyes. However, this happened 4 months ago now. Yahoo and MSN still love the site (I never saw any change with them) but it hasn't recovered from Google's drop. I keep hoping for a rebound as Google used to account for aout 60% of my traffic.
this idea of 24-48 hours of downtime can be avoided real easy by allowing an adequate amount of time to overlap duplicate content on the two servers simultaneously during the entire switch period. i.e. don't wait till the last minute to switch your name servers, rather a week or two, or more, before your hosting period is over with your current host, go ahead and purchase your hosting plan elsewhere and copy all of your content there. Once you feel comfortable that you've successfully copied all of your files from the old server to the new server, do your name server switch. however, don't cancel your old hosting just yet... i would then allow 72 or so hours to make sure that the url IP address change has successfully propegated around the internet fully before you cancel your former hosting account. just because you can ping it and see the new IP address doesn't mean that everyone else can - and for a business that does a sizeable amount of online business, 24-48 hours of downtime can be bad. just my 2 cents! VG
Thanks for your 2 cents vectorgraphx... Actually, I did just what you suggested. However, I didn't take the old site down for over a month. For that reason I thought perhaps I was being penalized by Google for having 'duplicate content' or something. I should have taken all of the old files off the old server much sooner like you mention. I didn't thinking taking longer would hurt me so bad. Maybe it had an effect...maybe it didn't. I wish I knew. Now I'm thinking that maybe it was just the DNS and registration info changes that caused the damage...
I have this problem same jedweb. My website is top 10 in my keywords but after i changing web hosting , my rank of GG drop so much . But in msn & yahoo are normal. Why ? How i should do ?