Changing server today, any SEO implications or advice you may have?

[Martin_S]

Morning,

We're moving our site to a new server today and having never done so before in an SEO capacity, are there any SEO implications, pitfalls, things to watch out for?

Advice and comments appreciated.

Thanks.

[RyanKent]

The simple answer is, no. From a SEO perspective, you can host your site on any hardware or software and it doesn't matter.

There are tons of corner cases. Just a few examples:

• Is your new server equal to or better then the old server? Most server changes are upgrades but if there are major speed issues with the new server, that can be an issue.

• Is your new server a bad neighborhood? If you share hosting with "bad" sites, there can be issues.

• Is your entire site being moved? Sometimes a single file missing such as .htaccess or robots.txt can cause major issues.

Overall, a server change in and of itself goes smoothly as long as no mistakes are made and it is an upgrade.

[Martin_S]

Thanks, Ryan

One less thing to worry (too much) about.

[seoug_2005]

Two questions Ryan -

1. Does the speed of the server affects seo rankings ?

2. How to find if  new server has a bad neighborhood?

[RyanKent]

Sites are penalized if pages load very slowly.

There are many tools which allow you to check what hosts are hosted on a server. One example: http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/

[seoug_2005]

Thanks

[Highland]

If you're changing IPs, I would be sure to lower your DNS time-to-live(TTL) to 1 hour about a day before the move. This would make your DNS rollover much faster. Not an SEO thing, per se, but something that certainly helps Googlebot.