Hi guys. Before the last Page Rank update by Google I changed my web hosting provider. After the PR update I had a huge drop (from 6 to 2). So I'm wondering if the web hosting provider matters in PR ?
Web hosting has nothing to do with it, it may be a case you didnt maintain your website, and what I mean by that is adding content and getting links on a regular basis, you may also have lost alot of links pointing to your website
With respect to comments by other members - I would like to differ on it -despite knowing everything. Yes - I know PR is all about quality and high PR backlinks. But I had similar experience as the OP with one of my site. I have a site close to two years. After the initial link-building I never done anything again. It got PR4 at first update and remained there for a few updates then suddenly went to PR5. I knew it was due to one of my articles becoming popular and getting some natural backlinks. Unfortunately I had to change my host few weeks before last update - and it was dropped to PR2 from PR5 I have been monitoring some facts -- While my previous host was just normal (as a result got hacked) - my present host has very high level of security and visits by bots are not very frequent as on other hosts ( I use 3 separate hosting companies). I had to transfer hosting of two other sites to this host. One went to PR0 from PR2 and another to PR3 to PR2. I'll again change this host tomorrow - of the site that went from PR5 to 2 and see what happens. There is seemingly no change in my backlinks. But I have started to think that - it is a good point to check and see.
The people that have that problem they should look at webmasters tools and if WMT give many errors and saying network unreachable or robots.txt unreachable for their site then the hosting is the problem.I have experience this problem in the past.
Andrew, that is a huge drop. Are you sure there were no other changes to your site at that time other then the hosting change? Hosting doesn't usually affect PR.
I changed hosts also just before the last update and saw my pr drop from a 3 to a 2, I'm getting ready to move to a new machine with a new set of IP's within the same host and am hoping it doesn't affect it again. So yes, I think moving hosts and IP's do have a negative effect on pr for a site, at least in the short term. My links were still increasing, the content changes hourly, and my traffic, time spent on site, and return visit rate continue to improve so the only thing I can think of that would have caused our pr drop is the moving of the host.
I also changed hosts and saw a drop in Page rank... I thought it would be the changing IP addresses that caused the problem Does anyone know definitively? If I do a server machine upgrade, I would likely hit the same problem.
No. There is no relation between web hosting and PageRank. Did you sold any links? maybe Google penalized your site.
I wonder guys if you change web hosting, does site's IP also change? Maybe it has some little effects too...
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, I think the IP change has an effect on rank and pr. I think Google thinks the site may have changed hands or something. Does anybody know of a way to prevent any negative effect when changing host IPs? I'm getting ready to move from a vps to a dedicated machine which in turn forces me to change IPs, I'm just now starting to gain some decent rank and it would kill me to have to start over again. I have to make the move though as I'm out of memory on the old plan and the server keeps rebooting.
No chance of it, Now google is updating frequntly some time wekkly once, and also crawling daily if ur site is good. So i think google change something to avoid fake rank and monitoring strictly. Better u do more promotion on yours site and make more quality BL
Web host has absolutely nothing to do with it. There were a lot of changes last time, but this wasn't one of them.