Server Migration, Does it effect SEO?

[Thos003]

About to go through a server migration. My intitial thought is that a change in servers shouldn't really change my rankings. But I've heard rumors...

Can a server migration change rankings? Why?

[Thos003]

No language change on the servers. I know I shouldn't be worried but hey, it's my baby. All grown up and going off to a college of her own now...

The upgrade should help with site speed so I am hoping that I might get a boost.

[Thos003]

Good to know that the SEO isn't harmed if there are no errors... I can see how a site missing the htaccess could be damaging. Ouch.

[StreamlineMetrics]

As long as the site and URL structure remain unchanged, then a server migration shouldn't make any impact in the rankings.

That being said, there are a few relatively uncommon things that could potentially cause some issues -

1. If you are going to be moving from a PHP server to an IIS server and you need to change your URLs to .asp or something like that, then you make take a temporary hit while the search engines crawl and index the new versions.

2. If the new server is slower or is prone to frequent downtime, then yes, it could negatively affect your rankings.

3. If you are moving to a new shared server, make sure the rest of the sites on that server are all legitimate sites that haven't been blacklisted by the search engines for any reason. For example, if you move your site to a server that has 100 Russian sites or Nigerian spammer sites all on the same IP, then it's possible your site could be negatively impacted.

Again, these are all relatively uncommon scenarios as long as you are simply moving your site over to another server while keeping everything else the same, so you shouldn't notice any difference in your rankings.

[deltasystems]

Unless the layout was changed or things went wrong, no. I've migrated maybe 50 websites over the past year with no ill effects. Any that did, occurred because something went wrong (htaccess issues, extended downtime) or because there was a design change. In the case of the latter, rankings return any time between a few days to a few weeks. (Assuming the markup/content is still good)