Heres my situation guys, i have a website hosted at godaddy, its my only website hosted there, its a site that appeals to people all over the world, so not country specific. Its never had se friendly url's enabled because of the way godaddy is, plus of course i cant backup through cPanel because as many of you will know godaddy doesn't have cPanel. The lack of a backup file as a rar file is one of the reasons i want to move it from there, its currently around 1Gig in size, the website i mean, theres lots of images there, more than 8k and the site recently got sitelinks too. Just wondering if i move it to a UK hosting account that i have, and away from godaddy what effect it may have, if the sitelinks go thats no big deal, i personally cant think of anything that could happen by doing this, but maybe ive not thought of something. The UK host that im with im happy with too, id upgrade to their next plan up to accomodate its size, and would be useful for when im uploading images and downloading backups as i get lovely fast transfer speeds with the UK host by only being around 100 miles away from them. If you have done this yourself id be happy to hear your opinion, btw im happy enough with godaddy's hosting, its just with this being my largest site in overall file size i dont have the convenience of easy backups, db backups are no probs, but its the actual files. Ranks well for plenty of keywords too, cant see that a change in server location would affect that too much? im not needing to rank better in the UK or anything.
You will start to get more UK traffic if you are ranking well on the search engines.. You may lose US traffic though I think If you check out google.co.uk and search for "mortgage" you will get different results than if you search for same keyword on google.com (and .ca, .de, etc).
Hi John, thanks, so other than that there would be no other real problems with switching to UK servers?
I think most important is not having two domains - co.uk plus .com on same server.. other than that - google can be told using google webmaster tools to which domain your site is targeted.
Exactly, by placing your website on different servers in a different country won't affect anything including your search engine rankings.
There has been a lot of topics in relation to losing rankings when moving server, however don't know how credible they are!
To avoid any significant loss of traffic, just follow the google guidelines : http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/ Moving your site to another servor does not affect your SERP position in general. But as John said, moving it to another country means a change of your geographical target for google. For instance, if your site with a generic TLD (.com, . net,...) get mainly traffic from the USA and if you move it to UK from the USA, you may lose traffic from USA and gain traffic from UK. In order to avoid such a traffic change, just select USA as geographical target in your google webmaster account when you move your site to UK.
Based on my experience, Google started to deindex my site when I changed IP address and DNS configuration. I had to wait for another 3 months before Google came back and reindexed my site's pages.
it should only affect your ip address. Nothing else should change at all. Unless you are doing something SE's don't like.
Totally legit, clean normal setup, so hopegully should be ok. Not too concerned if i lose rankings a little for it in google.com, as mad as that sounds.