Mar 08 2008
Does Moving To Different Host Affect Your Site’s SEO?
Well basically that’s the usual million dollar question of novice web entrepreneurs when they want to move their sites to a new host. The risks of losing good Page Ranks (PR) and Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) position, are typically the things they carefully consider before initiating the transfer. So, does moving to a different host affect your site’s search engine optimization?
Theoretically the answer is “no.” Moving from one host to another does not affect SEO. However, if you are not careful enough and you fail to follow instructions your sites could face risks of defeating your SEO. The impact largely depends on the actual transition process from your old host to a new one but utmost it depends on you.
Downtime is commonly the major issue you may face when you change to a new web host.
Downtimes, for sure, are not healthy for your search engine-optimized websites, especially when it is prolonged. During downtimes, search engine spiders fail to crawl your site’s web pages and thus affect your pages’ SERP ranking when the search engine begins to re-index all downloaded pages by spiders to provide fast searches. Downtime is commonly the major issue you may face when you change your host. The good thing is that the chance of experiencing a downtime can be prevented. A good host would always suggest the following steps to provide your sites a smooth and transparent transition from your old to new host:
- If you are moving a domain name to your new host as well, unlock your domain name from your old host/ registrar and provide your new host the EPP/authorization code. This will let them initiate domain name transfer request to your old host/registrar. If you are only moving a site or sites between hosts and does not involve domain name registrars, proceed to Step 2.
- Set up your website on your new web host. Begin by adding your domain name in your new host’s control panel. Copy all your files to appropriate domain folder and copy necessary databases from your old host to your new host to “mirror” your existing website. You can test/view the files you upload to your new host by typing into your browser your domain name alias. If you don’t know about this, ask your new host’s live chat support.
- Change your domain’s name server configuration (DNS) and point it to your new web host. After completing this step, your site should still be accessible online and still running from your old web host while the new DNS settings are propagating on the Internet.
The common pitfall in the process is when you take down the site on the old web host while the DNS is still propagating – definitely it would cause downtime for your site. It’s when the SEO risks come in. To prevent that to happen, keep your website files on your old web host for one week. This ample time lets the DNS propagation to complete which can be identified by monitoring where your website files are pointing to. If your domain is finally pointing to the files on your new web host, then the site transfer is done and complete. You can now take down the site from your old web host and enjoy the services of your new web host preserving your site’s PR rank and SERP position.
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March 9th, 2008 at 3:47 am
My move didn’t effect my PR. Probably because I did the same thing as you described in your steps.
I don’t think PR is effected by changing hosts simply because it has no baring on it. What does it matter if you change Hosts? Just because you’re getting a better deal with another provider shouldn’t effect your PR. Downtime will though.
Good post John.
March 9th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Thank you, Macbros. I wrote this because my friends are keep asking me if they will lose their site’s SEO potential when they move to a new host.
July 27th, 2008 at 4:57 am
I have a site that I have been contemplating moving for a while. The problem is that it ranks very high on some competitive keywords and it is my main hub site so it its ranking go down then the ranking of my other sites will go down as well.
The real problem is that I built the site using Homestead.com and do not know how to move the homestead files to another host so I am scared that the downtime will kill me…
Troy
August 18th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Thanks for the re-assurance, I want to move my site to a PHP based server rather than ASP and was not sure if the move would affect the SEO! I know age of a domain is important factor in SEO though.
Tom