Changing website providers
-
After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?
-
Hi Brett. I haven't used IDX for my sites because it is not available for our real estate board. If your board has IDX available then you should be able to integrate it into your website. Or you can hire someone to do it for you.
Send me a personal message (via my profile) and I'll tell you who I host with. I can share some ideas with you too.
Marie
-
thanks Marie. my site is ranking in the top 3 for most keywords. Where did you go to create your own wordpress site (bluehost?). Also, how does one deal with the integrated IDX issue for a real estate site from an SEO perspective? thanks
-
Hi Brett,
I'll share with you my experiences. I recently changed hosts from one that gave me some down time issues to a better host and it has improved my site. In my case, my urls did not change at all when I moved from one host to another so once I was moved, I didn't have to worry about 301 redirects.
I have another real estate site that is a templated site by a real estate site provider. These sites are great for realtors who are just starting out and know nothing about web sites. But, I soon found that as I was learning SEO and wanted to apply it to my site that using a templated site was a challenge when it comes to applying SEO. In many cases you can't alter things like the title tag or url structure. What I did was bite the bullet and create my own site (in Wordpress). I then applied SEO to this site and it is doing really well and bringing us in a lot of leads.
Are you ranking well for your keywords? If you are ranking well then I'd build a new site and try to keep all of the urls the same as they were (or 301 them to the appropriate ones if keeping the original structure is not possible). Similarly, if you have backlinks built to multiple pages on your site then the same applies.
If you don't have many backlinks, and if you don't have crazy competition I'd be tempted to just start from scratch.
Like EGOL said, if you go with another templated site provider you're at their mercy. With your own site, you are in control.
Another point I'd like to add is that I have a Canadian real estate site that is hosted in the US and it does really well.
-
I would avoid any JoeSchmoe.com's sitebuilder program. They often become orphans when Joe moves on to other projects.
I would favor something like wordpress that is used by millions of people, installs on your domain and there are many many smart SEOs who can tweak it for top performance.
If you are not into servicing your own databases, templates, etc. there are plenty of people out there who will do that for you on an hourly or contract basis. The important thing is to get someone who knows what they are doing from an SEO perspective.
-
thanks I suspected that this might be the case. The only other major consideration is whether or not to create a site with which I do not have to rely on a hosted site-builder but not sure what my options may be in this regard.
-
OK... it sounds like your site was made with a hosted site-builder.
If that is the case then moving your site will require a lot more planning and care.
If this site has links and rankings then you will need to preserve the URL structure of the site and if that changes use 301 redirects to preserve rankings and linkvalue.
You will also need to preserve your page optimization to be sure that no rankings are lost.
All of this could involve a lot of work.
I would honestly use this as an opportunity to make a huge improvement in your site.
I would either study this very carefully myself and make the move or I would hire a pro to do it for me or to provide close consultation.
If your biz is in Canada and you want to be found by Canadian searchers then you want the server in Canada.
-
I should have been more specific. My website is provided by a company in Canada and the host server is located in the US. If I move to a different company I will essentially have to build a new site with the same (as much as possible) content as I now have. The new company is located in Canada and the server is in Canada. Not sure if this will make a difference?
-
Changing hosting companies is a very safe thing to do as long as you are going to a quality host and their servers will be in the same country as your current host.
If your site is down a lot it could have a positive effect on your SERPs - so going to a quality host could be a good thing.
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
-
Two Different IP address pointing to my website, does it will effect my website from SEO point of view
Due to some reason my website https://xyz.com is not redirecting to my main website domain - https://www.xyz.com so our tech team suggested - we will have the non-www name on a different IP and we'll 301 redirect that to the https://www.xyz.com. if it works does it will effect our website from SEO point of view? please let me know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BPLLC0 -
Change of content
Hello, When you do a major change of content on a page I know it takes time to start seeing some results in terms of ranking. Let's say I make a change today expecting to see the first results of that change 2 months from now. Let's say in a month I decide to add some content and make again some minor changes. Do I have to wait another 2 months starting on the date I made my 2 nd changes to see some results or will I see the results of the 1 change as originally planned 2 months after my major content change ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How to rank my website in Google UK?
Hi guys, I own a London based rubbish removal company, but don't have enough jobs. I know for sure that some of my competitors get most of their jobs trough Google searches. I also have a website, but don't receive calls from it at all. Can you please tell me how to rank my website on keywords like: "rubbish removal london", "waste clearance london", "junk collection london" and other similar keywords? I know that for person like me (without much experience in online marketing) will be difficult task to optimize the website, but at least - I need some advices from where to start. I'm also thinking to hire an SEO but not sure where to find a trusted company. Most importantly I have no idea how much should pay to expect good results? What is too much and what is too low? I will appreciate all advices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gorubbishgo0 -
Problem with Google finding our website
We have an issue with Google finding our website: (URL removed) When we google "(keyword removed)" in google.com.au, our website doesn't come up anywhere. This is despite inserting the suitable title tag and onsite copy for SEO. We found this strange, and thought we'd investigate further. We decided to just google the website URL in google.com.au, to see if it was being properly found. Our site appeared at the top but with this description: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We also can see that the incorrect title tag is appearing. From this, we assumed that there must be an issue with the robot.txt file. We decided to put a new robot.txt file up: (URL removed) This hasn't solved the problem though and we still have the same issue. If someone could get to the bottom of this for us, we would be most appreciative. We are thinking that there may possibly be another robot.txt file that we can't find that is causing issues, or something else we're not sure of! We want to get to the bottom of it so that the site can be appropriately found. Any help here would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Credit Links on Client Websites
I know there have been several people who have asked this but a lot of them were back in 2012 before many of the google changes. My question is the same though. With all the changes with Google's algorithm. Is it okay to put your link on the bottom of your clients website. Like Web Design by, etc. Part of the reason is to drive traffic but also if someone is actually interested who designed the website, they will click it. But now reading about how bad links can hurt you tremendously, it makes me second guess if this is ok. My gut feeling says, no.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrino0 -
What is the best process to move a wordpress website ?
Hello Seomoz community, Simple question , i am looking forward to move a word press website from blog.domain.com sub domain to domain.com/blog to increase my indexed link on the root domain indexed by search engine.The blog i want to move already have high PR ( 6 ) i , of course want to avoid broken link , already indexed in search engine. What would be the best way to process to prepare this move accordingly on a SEO perspective ??? Many thanks in advance. Yan Desjardins
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SherWeb0 -
Effect of URL change on Website
Hello we are developers and we have just created a new webpage for a client of us. The problem is that we can not replace the old one by the new one, cause our client has developed over 15 satellite pages that calls directly to the code of the old page. If we completly remove the old page we will make those 15 pages go down. Those pages are working over domains specially register for SEO reasons. For example Main page is www.euroair.es Satellite page is www.aireacondicionadodaikin.com Satellite page has pretty good ranking for search term "aire acondicionado daikin" As I told you, we have a new page but we can not make the page work over root domain. So we thought we could make it work over www.euroair.es/es, and make a redirection 301 of homepage and another important inner pages. We chose "/es" folder because it seems like a language folder, but we are not very sure of the effects of pages working on that folder instead of working on root directory. What do you think? Is this matter important or doesn't? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite.com0 -
Optimising My Website Link Containers
Hi, I'm looking at my links containers and trying to optimise them. I would be greatful if anyone can give me some feedback on my plan for perfect optimaisation. My links are constructed as follows: I have a two states:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
1/. A Non Hover state which contains an Image and Text
2/. A Hover state which contains a bit more text - I do this as containing full text on the non hover state would not be good for users and would look ugly as well. Here's an example block of the HTML - as you can see from the URL, its quite a deep page level. From the URL and Alt / Titles the Page I am Linking to is about: "The Royal Hotel Accommodation New York Holidays". I Just a bit confused on how I should apply ALT and Title (Titles in particular) attributes given the nested DiV's etc - I can apply these to parent level, or apply all levels, or apply them to a mix. Also is there any obvious thinks you can think of I am missing that may help onsite SEO? Thanks in Advance CURRENT UNOPTIMISED CODE:
The Royal Hotel
New York Holidays Accommodation
The Royal Hotel
MY OPTIMISED CODE (Adding Title and Alt attributes):
The Royal Hotel
New York Holidays Accommodation
The Royal Hotel
0