Moved to a New Server IP Address

[Bucky]

Hi,

I just upgraded everything, a much faster server.  I have significantly improved page load times.

I have 2 questions

1.  I also upgraded my blog which is a component of the site.  I could NOT redirect post-for-post  so made single 301 redirect from all pages from the old blog to the root of new blog.  I did not care about the old blog, the posts are irrelevant now.

Will the massive redirects be a problem?

2.  I had some DNS issues and other problems that took me about 24 hours to fix during the transition.  The site is up an fully operational.

Will I be penalized?  If so, how long

Thank you,

[Highland]

1. That could be a problem. A 301 tells the bots (and everyone else) that a page has moved and it passes PR along to the new page. Without a 1:1 meticulous redirect your new pages with the old content will likely been seen as new duplicate content for a while. If you're positive this is the path you want to go, be certain that your old URLs return 404 so Google drops them ASAP. You will lose any backlinks to your old pages, however.

2. 24 hours is pretty normal, actually. Most people don't have granular control over the time-to-live of their DNS (which is the best way to handle it). Go run a report on IntoDNS and make sure they give you a clean bill of health. If it's clean, you should have no negative side effects from this.

[Bucky]

The URLS will not return a 404 because they have been 301

[Highland]

In that case their PR will flow to the page they are 301ed to and not the new content location. You will have to determine if that is a good thing or bad thing (i.e. do you want people to find your old content in the new location?)

[Bucky]

I mentioned the "Old Posts are Irrelevent".

I am concerned with how google will interpret a lot of 301 to the new blog

[Vizergy]

There are no limits on how many 301s you have pointing to any page.  The only thing that would happen (and you stated that you are not worried about the old posts so it shouldn't matter) is that all of the terms that the old pages ranked for that the new Blog home page is not relevant for will be lost.

As far as the large amount of 301's having a negative effect on ranking for terms that the new blog is relevant for; nothing to worry about.

[Dr-Pete]

(1) How many 301s are you talking about? As Highland said, you could lose link-juice (especially over time), since the new home-page for the blog won't seem as relevant to the redirected pages. I've heard of issues with 301'ing 1000s of pages, but those wer eusually temporary.

(2) Sometimes, post-Caffeine, Google crawls so fast that a 24-hour outage can cause some problems, but they're almost always temporary. You won't be penalized, per se - you could just see some rankings bounce while Google sorts things out.