Is Seo Effected by Switching Hosting Services?
-
I currently own a domain that is hosting by yahoo! However, they have no blog and they are not "responsive" to smart and mobile phones. I am looking to go from Yahoo! Hosting to maybe hostagor and looking to go from static to CMS for seo purposes.
My fear is of loosing SERP's as I do rank good for some majotr local keywords.
Any opinions?
James
-
If done correctly, changing DNS for an existing site shouldn't result in any downtime, Charles. There will likely be a short period where some users will begin seeing the new site while others are still seeing the old site, the site will never appear "down".
The length of time where visitors may see a mix of the old & new sites can be significantly reduced by setting short TTL times on the DNS settings before the actual final changeover takes place.
Paul
-
There's essentially no restriction on the type of url you can redirect from or to, James. Going from different file types to other file types is no problem. In fact, it's not uncommon to redirect from a specific page to a directory in the new website design, because the old page no longer has an exact equivalent on the new site.
You should be making a decision for every single page on your existing site. (Make certain you have an accurate list of every page as one of the first steps in the migration!) Each old page should redirect to either the location of the same page on the new site, or to a relevant equivalent page. This must be done regardless of how deep the pages are in your site hierarchy.
If there's truly nothing on the new site that's equivalent or useful for the old page to point to (e.g. you've decided to drop a particular topic from the new site completely), then it's OK to intentionally allow that old page to be a 404 Not Found - to tell the search engines that it truly doesn't' exist anymore and can eventually be removed from the index. But this Not Found should be on purpose because that's what you've decided, not by accident because you didn't deal with it properly.
That answer your question?
Paul
-
Thanks so much for your input! My old site has .html extensions, if I go to wprdpress, should and could I use 301 directs from .html to NON/html deep links? If so, would that enable me to keep my SERPS', thanks!
Jimmy
-
You're actually asking two questions here Jimmy
- Is SEO affected by switching hosting services?
- Is SEO affected by switching from a static site to a CMS based version?
The answer to number one is generally no. As long as the different elements of the hosting changeover are managed efficiently and correctly, there shouldn't be any major effect on rankings. There have been isolated examples of this kind of switch causing problems however, so nothing can be absolutely guaranteed.
As for number two, there will definitely be effects on your SEO and rankings when you switch from a static site to a CMS, particularly as in almost all cases your URLs will have to change.
This process involves quite a number of moving parts and specific steps that must be completed correctly in order to transfer as much of the value from your old website's structure to the new one. It's not impossible to do, companies do it all the time, but there is almost always at least some level of fluctuation in rankings/traffic after the new site goes live.
As long as you've handled all of the specific requirements of the migration, those rankings will usually settle and come back to the level you were at before the migration, and often to even higher levels if the new site is structured better and better optimized. This settling process can take anywhere up to 6 weeks or more, so shouldn't be undertaken during a critical period in your site's yearly cycle.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Just make sure your URLs are good. You shouldn't have any problem with SEO. Also, make sure that your website is not down for long periods of time because if Google Bot sees that the site is down, it may affect rankings. G bot won't do anything the 1st time around, but if it comes back again and the site is still down, you might be removed from the SERPs.
If that happens, your site will be algorithmically back to where it was before once the site is back up.
I didn't have any problem in rankings going from one host to another. Talk to Host Gator and to Dreamhost. They can help you transfer your site from one host to another.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International SEO - how likely is it autoredirect via IP Address will impact rankings?
Hello, We're looking to internationalise our site so that US visitors will see the US branded version while everyone else will see the global version (currently at .com). This question specifically is about location-based auto-redirects. The literature I've read (including Google) recommends against auto-redirection: "Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site." Insofar as I understand it the theory goes as follows. Google crawls mainly from the US Auto-redirecting by US IP to the US domain will also redirect the Googlebot crawlers Because of this the crawlers will only see the US site / domain and not original .com website Crawlers can't index what they can't see Drop in rankings for the original site However, one of my colleagues has pointed out to me a company which does use auto-redirects. If a user is in the UK and type in their website they will be redirected to the UK version of the site, US will be US etc. I have checked their rankings and they are still ranking highly for relevant terms. I have been asked why they have been able to do this without impacting their visibility. Any ideas? Given their success have the risks of auto-redirecting have been overstated? How can we ensure US visitors land on the correct internationalised domain without auto-redirects in place? Looking forward to your thoughts on this as well as your experiences. Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | SEOCT0 -
Multiregional / Multilingual SEO - Subfolders Question
Hello all, I wonder if you can help me... I have a question about subfolders in multi-regional / multi-lingual SEO - more specifically in reference to targeting the UK and the US. Having looked at some global websites these are the types of implementations I've most commonly seen: UK subfolders .com/uk .com/gb .com/gb/en-gb | .com/en-GB .com/gb-en .com/en-gb .com/uk/en US subfolders .com/us .com/us/en-us | .com/en-US .com/us-en .com/en-us .com/us/en Are any of these approaches better than others or is it all a matter of personal preference? What's the reason for using .com/gb over .com/uk (or vice versa) for example? Secondly, my assumption is that the examples above which include language subfolders do so because these companies are targeting different speaking users within these countries. Would I be right to think that since the organisation I work for is only targeting the American speakers in the US, we wouldn't need to go so far as to have language subfolders in addition to location subfolders? Would be great to get some feedback / suggestions! Thanks!
International SEO | | SEOCT0 -
Need advice - International SEO strategy
Hello Moz ! I've been working for some months on a very interesting SEO project. I even opened some discussions on it (Multi Regional website - Folder strategy, Multi Company websites) with amazing feedbacks from the community. INITIAL PROJECT Set up an international website with different subsidiaries name, 1 person to manage the whole web, different locations / regions / languages and same products. INITIAL IDEAS For the beginning of the project we opened a main website in .com with subfolders for the other subsidiaries .com/es ... However our business is mainly in English so we decided to focus harder (closing the .com/uk, using a unic com/blog, opening more pages etc.) on the main domain in .com CURRENT ISSUE How to rank locally our services with: Main domain in .com Last Google updates against link building Most of customers searching in English in different countries Company working in more than 80 countries, through 13 subsidiaries **IDEA ** I was thinking about using our blog to focus 3 months on a thematic around one service (blog post with link to the services article on our website, guest blogging with link to a blog post, discussions on Linkedin around the thematics, etc.) QUESTION What could be the best strategy to rank locally our products in this case ? Hope you can share your best advise. I guess I'm not the unique one to face this issue. So it'll be good to make a good strategy for all our community 🙂 Tks a lot ! Florian
International SEO | | AymanH0 -
Local SEO in Canada
I am trying to do some local optimization for some clients in Canada and it got me thinking, are there different best practices and different sites I want to use when working in Canada?
International SEO | | rbrianforrester0 -
SEO Recommendations
Our website www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk has slowly slipped down the page one ranking of Google.co.uk for our main search terms after several years at number one. I've looked closely at our site as much as a "non-techie" can do but wondered if anyone could recommend a good SEO company/individual that could take an overview and then help us try and climb back up the page one rankings. As a small business I dont' have tons of money to spend but I realise the importance of good SEO and I am prepared to spend as much as is required within reason. I thought members of SEOMoz were more likely to be able to recommend good SEO companies rather than me trawl around the web trying to find a company or individual that might suit our needs. I hope this is a suitable question for this forum but apologise in advance if it isn't. Colin
International SEO | | NileCruises0 -
Does 301 redirect on homepage impact seo strongness of this page
Hi, we are running a multilingual website with this structure : http://www.website.com/en
International SEO | | Samuraiz
http://www.website.com/fr
http://www.website.com/de
http://www.website.com/lang (etc.) with then all onsite URLs this way:
http://www.website.com/en/hello
http://www.website.com/fr/bonjour
http://www.website.com/it/ciao We have a 301 redirect on http://www.website.com going to http://www.website.com/en - except if a user already went on the website and chose a specific language. My question is : Do you think the english homepage will have more seo power if it goes directly to http://www.website.com/ I wonder if we lose some linkjuice with the 301 redirection, as many backlink goes directly to http://www.website.com1 -
Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.
International SEO | | Amjath0 -
Internationalization and SEO
Hi Everyone, This is my first post in this new Q & A section!! This interface looks great!! Now onto the question.... We have www.example.com in English that has 50,000+ URLs. We are in the process of building a new site example.de targeting German users. The German site (www.example.de) will be a mirror of the English site at launch as we want to give a full experience to people visiting the .de domain. However, not all pages will be localized as we can't support that. We are planning on localizing the core sets of pages (~500) and leaving the rest in English. Post launch, we will have additional milestones to localize the remaining pages until the entire site is localized (converted to German). Is this the correct way to go? Will this cause duplicate content issue?
International SEO | | Amjath
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose? Thanks for the help!0