What Will Google Do When I Change Web Hosts?

[LisaT]

Hi Ya'll!

I could use some of your expertise. I am very happy with my current Google rankings on some specific keywords. However, I'm about to switch my webhost. My IP address will change. URL will stay the same.

How will this affect my current Google rankings? Will I have to resubmit my site to Google and basically start over. Does the GoogleBot track by URL or IP address?

Should I leave something at the old IP address and link it to the new one?

Any tricks you have to make this painless would be appreciated.

Thanks a bunch.

[Grumpus]

Google and the rest of the gang are getting better about updating their DNS listings more frequently. Even so, if you have the money and time, here is the best scenario.

1.) Plan on leaving the old site up on the old host with nothing changed on their part for 1 more month after you "flick the switch".

2.) Put up the site in the new location.

3.) Go to your domain registrar and transfer the nameservers over.

4.) In a day some people will be hitting your new site and others will be hitting your old site. By the end of day four (at the latest) all "humans" should be hitting your new site. Search engines may take a bit longer though.

Leave the sites up in both places for AT LEAST a week just to make sure you pick up all the users and most of the engines. If possible, as I said, leave the old site up for a month - just in case. At least if there is a spider in there for some reason, it's crawling stuff and it'll get into the index. (And since URLs are the same, it won't matter from a user perspective).

G.

[Grumpus]

Oh - and if you do it this way, you won't have any PR problems or any "starting over" to do.

G.

[greg]

nothing happens. while google checks the IP for purposes of internal linking, they do not check it for anything else. Your site is your site, reguardless of where it is located. If you are switching to a host which has other sites on the server with many links to your own you could experience a slight decline in PR, but it would not be much, and would not show up for at least a month.

[polarmate]

If you have a reasonable # of backlinks to your site and you know that the bots hit your site frequently then you really have nothing to worry about.

The so called witty worm struck my web host on the 19th of March. My sites were on the servers that were affected. After a couple of days, my sites were put up with an 'under construction' page on new servers with new IPs (dedicated not shared). My sites became partly functional after 7 days. No loss in PR. No loss in rankings. The bots were hitting the new IP from the very first day that the logs were turned on - it was less than a week. This was as good as moving hosts as the new IPs had to propagate just like when you switch hosts.

On another site which is on a shared IP, I moved from one server to another within the same network / same name servers. There was no way I could leave the old site up as the host headering would not permit me to have the same domain (host header) on more than one IP within the same network. I moved the site and the bots found it and there was no change in the pathetic traffic it receives or the PR.

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by greg

while google checks the IP for purposes of internal linking, they do not check it for anything else.

They do also check it for regional listings - sites physically hosted in the UK will be favoured for "UK only" listings on Google.co.uk. It's precisely because of this that I am almost certainly going to move my .com sites to the UK, as a method of boosting traffic through these searches.

[MadHatter]

Ive not thought about that before,
May be a good idea for my mums silver jewellery online store that will be opening in May.
That way she is likely to get more visitors from the Uk right (hence cheaper postage costs on the bought items)
Thanks for that info.