What's the effect of changing the host of a web sites to its SE rankings? Does it affect to the "age" considered by search engines? Is their a problem of changing the IP address? Do SEs give a speciall attention to IP addresses? Or, only the domain name matters?
Obviously It affects RANKINGS: 1) Search Engines have doubt about your stability. 2) and we all all know that linking with same ip recived penalty.
as number domains increasing day by day ip inportance of SERP will go down. you can't have dedicated ip or divesified class ips for your site network. more and more number domain registrations are done every day and new sites are seting up. certainly hosts are running short of ips. many web hosting providers are running their hosting service through proxy or NATing also if site is load balanced along number ips it does not have any thing to do with SERPs. IMO. changing of host does not affect your SERPs provided you have smooth trasition and less downtime.
We have a winner for most incorrect post of the day. Moving your host will not affect your rankings. Move it loads of times and it might raise some kind of flag though. If you are moving to another country then your rankings are very likely to change.
I had a PR3 Site. Changed my host (my site was down for a day or two), and now its a PR2 I dont know why. I'm sure both hosts are in the US. Maybe my site was just going to go down on the next PR update - maybe i lost some backlinks. But i've always thought it was due to the move. I guess not after reading this. It being a pain trying to get it up a level again. cheers.
I believe the only accurate response has been from mad4. Due to geo-targetting changing hosts can have a dramatic effect on rankings depending on the location of the new server. Make sure it's where your audience is - no doubt the USA. Pete
Are you sure that Google's geotargeting (i.e. so-called preference to return local/in-country sites) is looking at the IP and not just the domain name? (i.e. .com = US, .co.uk = UK, etc.) There are lots of big sites that use Akamai where they have, in effect, 16,000+ IP addresses where their site can be accessed -- basically many IP's in every single country. In that case, Google wouldn't get any use out of geotargeting based on IP. I have to think they're looking mostly (if not entirely) at the country domain extension (TLD). LC
Hosting location as determined by IP address is a huge factor in SEO. Far more than TLD in most cases. For example if I am in the UK with a .com domain I can still rank top of google but if my site is hosted in the US then I have no chance. Its not just google either - MSN take hosting location into account even more.
It has a minor effect, unless you move it to another country, but it does have an effect, especially if your site was down for a couple of days and googlebot tried to visit!
The rule of thumb is that no single element is going to slam your serps negatively unless you're using some serious blackhat techniques (and even then sites often don't get penalized very quickly. I've worked on a lot of websites and done a lot of SEO and I've never had a problem with switching hosts. It might have a minimal effect if you're targeting one country and your server is in another country, but not necessarily. For instance if you're targeting UK visitors and you have a .uk domain, plus incoming links from other .uk domains that's what's important...server location won't mean diddly in this situation. Another rumor that I often see people ask about on message boards is if changing domain ownership will affect your serps. From my experience it really doesn't matter as long as the site has the same content and related links. I've handled registrant name changes for clients with no adverse effects. Content, title tags, and incoming links are still the most important elements!
It'll not effect your ranking at all. Because your content and link backs are same even after you change your host.
Your ranking WILL effect by changing the IP/DNS, as Google evaluates everything about your site, like Domain, IPs, Hosting, Neighbors (in case of shared hosting)... There are 200 ranking factors (as per Matt Cutts) which Google considers about a website; and IP is one of them. Whenever you change your IP, to Google, it means that something fishy is going on. whether you are changing it for a good cause... Anyway, I personally experienced a big ranking fall on few major keywords (on Yahoo! & Google),wwhen I changed my DNS/IP last year. Out of almost 6 major keywords, only 1-2 have been "saved" but on the rest, I am no where near top 50. So, I suggest, whenever you are about to launch a site, make sure you also consider having a good, reliable and fast web hosting service. Enjoy, M Ahson
I have found over the years that changing hosting or a new ip will not affect seo ranks. What will affect your rank is if you change around the title and meta info. Just leave everything the same and you should be ok when you move hosts.