How does changing hosting affect rankings?
-
I have a hosting account that is ancient. So is it's CPanel, its way of operation (I have to call in to change the zone file), and its hardware and software (It can't even recognize Wordpress as a user so i have to change permissions to change anything.)
I plan on moving the site, but I want to prepare for any changes that may happen. Currently the site ranks between #1 or 3 for quite a few very valuable words. It is also in season for this business. I know changing hosting data or servers can cause google to temporarily drop rankings. Does anyone have any experience with this or now how long the faded rankings can last? Or if its even true?
-
Thank you Spencer. I try to answer where I can.
Good luck with your site!
-
Thanks EGOL, you are a a valuable asset to these boards.
-
As long as you are simply moving your files there should be no change in your rankings. I have moved hosting many times and have not experienced any problems whatsoever.
The only thing that I can think of that might be an issue is if you are changing the country where your host is located. That can change your SERPs in certain geographic areas.
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
-
Is SEO affected when changing from siteA.example.edu to siteB.example.edu/siteA?
Are there SEO ramifications as a result of moving a group of sites that currently each have their own subdomain, under one subdomain? Ex: changing college.example.edu, dept1.example.edu and dept2.example.edu to college.example.edu, college.example.edu/dept1 and college.example.edu/dept2... etc. For example, let's say dept2 has a page about 4H and dept3 has a different page about 4H, if they're no longer their own subdomains, could only one of the 4H pages rank? In addition, would moving the department name further down the URL path cause the department's front page not rank as well? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnneHolz0 -
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Cannot find reason for drop in ranking
One of our clients is a lingerie retailer, that also sells swimwear and nightwear. They have a webshop, with landing pages such as /lingerie, /swimwear and /nightwear (only in Dutch). The nightwear page is doing ok (#5 in Google NL), but for the swimwear and lingerie pages, something strange has happened and I have no clue what it is. On May 7, the /swimwear page ranked 24 for swimwear in Google NL. In that period, the homepage was ranking at #40-50. One week later, on May 14, the homepage was ranked 24 for swimwear, and the /swimwear page was nowhere to be found. The homepage is currently ranking 17/18 for swimwear. Something similar seems to have happened for lingerie. The homepage was ranking at around 11-13 for a few weeks in April/May, the /lingerie page was ranking at 8 in May, and then after the 4th of June, both the homepage and the /lingerie page no longer seem to have any decent rank for lingerie. So, trying to find the problem: I checked the Moz On-Page Grader for all three pages/keywords. All pages get an A. Robots.txt hardly contains anything, and there's no robots meta tag to block the page. Checked Google Webmaster Tools just in case, nothing out of the ordinary. The page contains 342 URL's which is a lot, but that shouldn't be too problematic, I thought? I used the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to analyze the current top 10 for lingerie, and compared it to our client's stats. Page Authority in the top 10 is 37-68, our clients is 33. Domain Authority in the top 10 is 27-100 (wiki page), our clients is 43. MozRank for the top 10 is 6,6-8,0, our clients is 6,7. MozTrust for the top 10 is 7,0-7,1, our clients is 7,0. The basics all look fine! Now, the page could use some link building, the number of links is a little low compared to the top 10 entries. We're also in the process of redesigning the page, adding more products but also more content (text and images) to inspire visitors a little more. But being low on links doesn't seem a good explanation for such a relatively sudden change in ranking. As far as we can tell, looking back at commits by our developers, nothing changed around that time that could have this impact. Of course it's possible that we missed something, we're still looking. Also, it's strange that these sudden changes took place for swimwear and especially lingerie, but not for nightwear. I'd really appreciate any tips, hints etc. to find out what's going on here. Thanks in advance! Michel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DocdataCommerce0 -
A question of rankings (with actual domains)
Working with the main site featured in this Open Site Explorer comparison (you'll need a pro account to view this), and have been for quite some time. Recently we've slid behind Ebay (huge brand, I get it), but the other competitors don't really make sense to me. Main phrase is pontoon boats, and maybe I'm too close to this, but we seem to be in the best shape overall in terms of the domain, the page itself, and even our social media is pretty successful (we're closing in on 5,000 likes and have a pretty engaged audience). More internal linking is an opportunity, but I'd like another set of eyes (or several for that matter) to weigh in on opinions. I'm a bit stumped. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
Can 404 Errors Be Affecting Rankings
I have a client that we recently (3 months ago) designed, developed, and launch a new site at a "new" domain. We set up redirects from the old domain to the new domain and kept an eye on Google Webmaster Tools to make sure the redirects were working properly. Everything was going great, we maintained and improved the rankings for the first 2 months or so. In late January, I started noticing a great deal of 404 errors in Webmaster Tools for URLs from the new site. None of these URLs were actually on the current site so I asked my client if he had previously used to domain. It just so happens that he used the domain a while back and none of the URLs were ever redirected or removed from the index. I've been setting up redirects for all of the 404s appearing in Webmaster tools but we took a pretty decent hit in rankings for February. Could those errors (72 in total) been partially if not completely responsible for the hit in rankings? All other factors have been constant so that lead me to believe these errors were the culprits.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheOceanAgency0 -
How to rank high on Bing?
Today, I was checking Google Analytics for my website. I found too many variation in Visits between Google & Bing. I can understand that, We are not getting specific visits from Bing due to bad ranking. Then, I have done detail R & D + read few useful articles to get it done. I found such a important discussion on Bing forum which is associated to draft on page. I also checked Bing webmaster tools to know more about my website. I found that, crawling from Bing is really slow and let duane know about it via Twitter. I have read Bing rankings cheat sheet. But, I am really confuse after reading it. Because, I am following Google webmaster guidelines as well as Bing webmaster tools guidelines. So, How can I improve my performance over Bing? Is there any rock solid method for Bing like Google which may help me to achieve milestone? I have one request for Rand to write down marathon blog post to rank high on Bing....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Well Ranked National Site - Need Local Rankings
We are a virtual company doing business in 30 states nationwide. All our business is done via the phone, fax, email and express mail. Back in 2008 I optimized our small 8 page website for our key terms and was able to rank the site #1 nationally for our main keywords. (I did a 6 month consulting gig for the company). The site remained #1 in Google until last year when some serious competitors entered the space and knocked us down to the middle of page one. Then with the Panda update #1 & #2 we have seen our traffic drop 50% mostly due to not receiving the City + Keywords rankings any more. I have now been hired full time to bring us back but my question is this Do I need to build out city specific pages on the existing website? Do I need to buy keyword specific domains and create microsites? Do a combination of both? I would love to do both but I have to prioritize my efforts. Any thoughts would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FidelityOne0