Hi Jill, I'm an avid reader of your newsletter and your tips have helped us get some great results for our website -- keep 'em coming!

Anyway, I'm writing because we're about to move our website to a new server and I was wondering if that's going to affect our search engine rankings at all? A lot of individual pages in our site come up for various searches in various search engines and I'm worried we might lose those places if the site is on a new server.

The structure of the website will be exactly the same, the domain name will be the same, and all the pages will have the same names but will anything change if the site is in a new location at a different IP address? If the site is offline for a day while the DNS and things go through will that affect our place in Google?

I'm sure this is a problem that affects every Webmaster at some stage, and I was wondering if you could shed some light on it...?

Cheers,

Matt

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Matt,

My server just had a major upgrade so I essentially went through the same thing recently. It's a real pain in the neck to move all your files over and get your scripts up and running. I totally understand why you do not want to have to worry about your listings at the search engines on top of everything else.

The good news is that generally a server move shouldn't affect your rankings. I've changed servers many, many times over the past eight years, and it's never been a problem with the search engines. Even if your site is down for a day (and there's no reason why it should be) it still shouldn't affect your rankings. There's a slight chance that the search engine spider will come crawling during the downtime, but most of them won't just give up after one try. If your site is down for a few days or more, you do run the risk of having the engines assume your site is gone for good. Be sure to work closely with your old and new hosts to minimize any downtime. All of my server moves have been accomplished without any downtime whatsoever.

There's only one possible glitch to the above scenario, and it's kind of a freaky one. I've heard reports lately that Google can be very late to update their own DNS information. This means they can come crawling to the old site for a while after the move, because they still think the domain is at the old IP address. When this happens and there's no site there for them to crawl, you MAY be removed from their database. When Google finally updates their DNS info, they will find your site at the new server, and you should get back into the database.

Because of this strange quirk, you might want to try to keep your site alive at the old IP for at least a month or so after the move. I don't really understand why Google's DNS should ever be out of date, but it's something to keep in mind during your server switch. If you can't keep your pages alive on the old server for a while, then all you can do is hope for the best. Most likely, everything will be peachy keen. After all, people switch servers all the time with relatively few problems.

Good luck!

Jill