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Hello Mozers

Our site has been on a dedicated server for about four years now. (no other sites, just ours on the server)

I have made the decision to move it to a much better and faster server than the current server we are on for more than one reason.

My big fear is Google will lose trust for my site because of the IP change. Ip's stay with the server at 1and1 they do not follow the website.

So, I have done my due diligence and copied over all code and databases and have tested it completely to insure there are no issues when I change the DNS to point to the new server.  Made sure 1and1 is giving me an IP that has never been used, I am Keeping the old server on until cached DNS records expire for it.

Is there anything else I need to do to make sure I do not lose current rankings in Google? I have heard nightmare stories about making these kinds of changes but at this point for our site there is no turning back this is a change that must take place.

Any pointers and advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

Angie,

I would have to say this is not a "bad practice" Matt does not say it is bad or spammy nor does Google. It also would really depend on your site structure as what the best way to do this. My site it structured just like this as well as all of my major competitors except for one.

They do use sub domains for example: Seattle.mydomain.com

And I have to tell you in my opinion it is not as effective as the way I and many others do it. A good example of what I am saying is in the real estate industry. Go to Google and search "seattle homes for rent" or "seattle homes for sale" And you will see what I am talking about. You also will see one company uses a sub domain plus a directory to target the location for the users search. the result looks like this:
washington.theirdomain.com/Seattle.

In this instance it does work well but if you do some searches in other major markets or just some different terms for this industry you will see all the big sites have the structure of www.theirdomain.com/target-city
And it works well and always have for years. But who knows if Google wakes up tomorrow in a bad mood or not?

Good Luck!

Doug,

About 45 days ago I took advise of a user here in the forum to reduce my title tags to one target keyword phrase for each of my city pages (i have about 5000 city pages) and at the time was doing research about adding the "company name" at the end of the title tag if room permitting that it was not to long.

I targeted a lower hanging fruit than my original two keywords reduced my target keyword to one phrase and added our company brand name to the end of the title tags for every page and IMO that was the silver bullet for me along with page content improvements our traffic has increased by 40% and lead conversions have also increased on our site.

And at the time this user told me it was a good idea to add my company name to the title tags and reduce to one target keyword I was researching my competitors and a few of them where already doing this so i figured why not give it a try? It has definitely worked for us and instead of fighting for placement on page two of Google we are now for most searches on page one in the top five results for all of them!

SEO success story for sure using seo moz tools and taking some really good advice from a real expert on this forum.

Oh and also Google use to change my title tags also just as you mentioned...I can no longer find pages where Google is re writing them anymore. So I guess I did something right.

Good luck!

I have used SEO moz for some time and the rank tracker almost never ever, ever works. That error message at the top of the screen has been there for days now. But even previously before then if it did work after you track a few keywords it stops working anyways. Terrible.

http://ranktracker.seomoz.org/

STILL DOES NOT WORK