Is Seo Effected by Switching Hosting Services?

[jimmy0225]

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

[ThompsonPaul]

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

[ThompsonPaul]

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

[jimmy0225]

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

[ThompsonPaul]

You're actually asking two questions here Jimmy

1. Is SEO affected by switching hosting services?
2. 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

[Francisco_Meza]

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.