Hi there, I have been using Godaddy as a hosting for my established site for several years. I am planning to have my own dedicated server from hostgator so that I can have more control over things. The problem is, I have never switch hosting before and I don't know how much it will affect my search ranking in the SEO point of view. Since the site is making me 30% of my income every month, and google is a major source of traffic to my site, I don't want to see a huge drop if income simply because I switch the server. What is the proper way of switching server? How will it affect the ranking (and/or PR) in short term? Thanks in advance.
I had done it before several times.One of my site has gpr 5 then i change domain and hosting to 3ix and after several months nothing bad happens,my site still has its gpr 5.Then after several months this site gets banned in google for keyword spamming www.sm-insurance.com
I have moved several websites to new hosts and never had a problem. I have heard of people that say they lost pagerank but who really knows. My advice would be to make the downtime as little as possible.
Indeed, make sure there as little as possible downtime. Or track when last time bots have crawled your site, once you get crawled start moving the whole site.
Agree with this. Also as the others said, try to make the downtime as little as possible, a couple of hours won't be bad at all