Changing Hosting Companies - Site Downtime - Google Indexing Concern
-
We are getting ready to switch to a new hosting company. When we make the switchover, our sites will be offline for a couple of hours and in some cases perhaps as long as 12 hours while DNS is configured -- should we be worried about Google trying to index pages and finding them unavailable? Any fear of Google de-indexing pages. Our guess was that Google would not de-index anything after just a short period of not being able to find pages -- it would have to be over an extended period of time before GOOGLE or BING would de-index pages -- CORRECT?
Just want to gut check this before pulling the trigger on switch over to new hosting company. We appreciate input on this and/or any other thoughts regarding the switch over to new hosting company that we may not have thought of.
Thanks,
- Matt
-
thanks, good resource
-
There's an excellent blog post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance too.
-
Thanks, appreciate it.
-
I would say it is preferable to go ahead and setup the site on the new host first before you take down the old one. While you should be "ok" with the downtime, I would not recommend it. You never know when the spiders come along. You would probably not be de-indexed, but Google would see a bunch of errors and you could potentially see a drop in the SERPS and then traffic to your site as a result. This should all recover.
I have seen on our sites drops in traffic when we have had technical difficulties. I usually see issues in GWT or other tools and I get them fixed and the traffic comes back.
Here is the other thing. What if something goes wrong during that 12 hours? What if 12 hours becomes 24, 48 etc. due to unforseen issues. That is just bad for business/users in general when a site is down for any amount of time. You do not want that, let alone the search engine issue. What if something goes wrong with the new host and you need to revert back to the old? This has happened to me and trust me, you do not want this to happen to you. Murphy likes to play games with scenarios like this, I do not mess with Mr. Murphy and his laws.
If I were you here is what I would do
-
setup the new host
-
setup your site on the new host
-
test test test on the new host
-
change the DNS from the old to the new host
-
watch the traffic move
-
test test test on the new host
-
shut down the old host
We have overlapped for up to 2 months with old and new hosts just to make sure everything is set. You always back up your data yes? Why would you not want to have a backup with your entire website?
Good luck!
-
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
-
Why my subcategories google index much faster than my head categorienames
I have categories whirlpools . saunen . dampfduschn . etc and got sub categories Ts- Serie Whirlpool Modelle T15 Serie Whirlpool Modelle I have changed the title of the head categories and also the sub categories, but google change the title of my subcatgegoreis very quick and now 4 days later still the head navigigation not changed what does that mean ? google index my head navigation bad ? regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HolgerL
Marcel0 -
301 migration - Indexed Pages rising on old site
Hello, We did a 301 redirect from site a to site b back in March. I would check on a daily basis on the index count using query "site:sitename" The past couple of days, the old domain (that was 301 redirected) indexed pages has been rising which is really concerning. We did a 301 redirect back in march 2016, and the indexed count went from 400k pages down to 78k. However, the past 3 days it went from 78k to 89,500. And I'm worried that the number is going to continue to rise. My question - What would you do to investigate / how to investigate this issue? Would it be screaming frog and look at redirects? Or is this a unique scenario that I'd have to do other steps/procedures?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Lately I have noticed Google indexing many files on the site without the .html extension
Hello, Our site, while we convert, remains in HTML 4.0. Fle names such as http://www.sample.com/samples/index.shtml are being picked up in the SERPS as http://www.sample.com/samples/ even when I use the "rel="canonical" tag and specify the full file name therein as recommended. The link to the truncated URL (http://www.sample.com/samples/) results in what MOZ shows as fewer incoming links than the full file name is shown as having incoming. I am not sure if this is causing a loss in placement (the MOZ stats are showing a decline of late), which I have seen recently (of course, I am aware of other possible reasons, such as not being in HTML5 yet). Any help with this would be great. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gheh20130 -
B2B site targeting 20,000 companies with 20,000 dedicated "target company pages" on own website.
An energy company I'm working with has decided to target 20,000 odd companies on their own b2b website, by producing a new dedicated page per target company on their website - each page including unique copy and a sales proposition (20,000 odd new pages to optimize! Yikes!). I've never come across such an approach before... what might be the SEO pitfalls (other than that's a helluva number of pages to optimize!). Any thoughts would be very welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
There is no change of address pending for your site
Hi everyone. Google has recently started using our old .net instead of .com in the SERPS. I went to do a change of address for the old http://www.sqlsentry.net and it gives me the "There is no change of address pending for your site." I've tried for both www and non-www and still get the same result. All pages seem to be redirecting to the new site with no issues. Is there anything else I can do to change this? Or is there a step I'm missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Why google does not show my site on my branding keyword?
Hi, I am the site owner of http://www.lankahq.net. It is a youtube video hosted website. 95% of the video contents are daily telecasting TV shows and categorized to make easy to find the specific video of the day of preferred program of the viewer. About 1 year ago suddenly disappeared my site from the google. Before happened that it was performing very well in search. Google showed my site contents within few minutes after I update in their search results when someone search for that. At the moment it does not show even some one search for "lankahq". It showing only if search for "lankahq.net", "lankahq.com" or "www.lankahq.net" something like a search keyword related to my domain name. Some other websites have added my branding keyword LankaHQ as a user of their site and they showing on top of Google. But not mine. It is much appreciated if someone can have a look on this matter. I can not find where is the problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprasad0 -
Google Indexed the HTTPS version of an e-commerce site
Hi, I am working with a new e-commerce site. The way they are setup is that once you add an item to the cart, you'll be put onto secure HTTPS versions of the page as you continue to browse. Well, somehow this translated to Google indexing the whole site as HTTPS, even the home page. Couple questions: 1. I assume that is bad or could hurt rankings, or at a minimum is not the best practice for SEO, right? 2. Assuming it is something we don't want, how would we go about getting the http versions of pages indexed instead of https? Do we need rel-canonical on each page to be to the http version? Anything else that would help? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianspatterson0 -
Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?
I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers0