Changing Web Hosting
-
We're about to change web hosting providers and I'm wondering whether there's an "optimal" way to do this without losing any SEO value. Is it as simple as changing hosts without SEO in mind - point the domain to the new host?
-
As long as as the hosting change goes smoothly - i.e. no extended downtime during the transition - there should be no SEO impact.
The file that's even more important than the robots.txt is the .htaccess file. You need to make sure it's migrated to the new site as well as it could contain significant numbers of redirects that need to be preserved in the new setup. It's a frequently missed element if the hosting transfer is done manually.
Paul
-
By page names I mean the URL, so for example
www.yoursite.com/about.htm must not be changed to www.yoursite.com/aboutus.htm or anything else.
There is nothing in the transfer process that would cause the URL to change but often website owners take the transfer as an opportunity to make changes that they have been planning for a while.
-
What do you mean by page names? Titles of pages? And yes I'll make sure the robots.txt file is on the new host after we point the domain. Thanks Sean.
-
There should be no issue, just make sure you have a back up of the site before you change anything.
Do not change page names and make sure you have the Robots txt file is on the site once you have moved
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
-
Change category of a post
Hi, Finally I decide to renovate my site structure, but I have a question, if I have an old post and I change its category there is some SEO problem? The post permalink is "www.sitename.com/namepost". Last question, it's better to have one category for post or more than one category for post? Thank You
Technical SEO | | Marco3961 -
Should we change the publish date in WordPress when updating a post?
Hi everyone, We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today? If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site. Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Tom
Technical SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Web address change - Search impact?
Hi, I have whosjack.org and wjlondon.com - on there is a London relevant news and events website. whosjack.org has been the main site for some time and has decent search pick up. Currently wjlondon.com just redirects to whosjack.org. However - having london in our actual address would be far more beneficial for us. So ideally I want to swap the two web addresses around. Have the main site at wjlondon and have whosjack redirecting to it. However - I don't want to loose traffic from search. An idea I had was to create a sept site at wjLondon that was a feed of social content and links from whosjack so that it starts to get a decent search and then swap them over but not sure whether that would actually be detrimental what with all the dupe content issues with google etc. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
Is it better to have hosting that specializes in performance or have the host closer to you physically?
I am looking to change to a new hosting company. I am debating between taking a company that specializes in Wordpress and performance but is situated far from my users or a local company that might not be as good from a performance/speed point of view. Which do you think I should go with? My users are near Europe and the Wordpress hosting that I am considering is in the US.
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Host sitemaps on S3?
Hey guys, I run a dynamic web service and I will start building static sitemaps for it pretty soon. The fact that my app lives in a multitude of servers doesn't make it easy to distribute frequently updated static files throughout the servers. My idea was to host the files in AWS S3 and point my robots.txt sitemap directive there. I'll use a sitemap index so, every other sitemap will be hosted on S3 as well. I could dynamically mirror the content from the files in S3 through my app, but that would be a little more resource intensive than just serving the static files from a common place. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tanlup0 -
How can I tell Google, that a page has not changed?
Hello, we have a website with many thousands of pages. Some of them change frequently, some never. Our problem is, that googlebot is generating way too much traffic. Half of our page views are generated by googlebot. We would like to tell googlebot, to stop crawling pages that never change. This one for instance: http://www.prinz.de/party/partybilder/bilder-party-pics,412598,9545978-1,VnPartypics.html As you can see, there is almost no content on the page and the picture will never change.So I am wondering, if it makes sense to tell google that there is no need to come back. The following header fields might be relevant. Currently our webserver answers with the following headers: Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0, public
Technical SEO | | bimp
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Does Google honor these fields? Should we remove no-cache, must-revalidate, pragma: no-cache and set expires e.g. to 30 days in the future? I also read, that a webpage that has not changed, should answer with 304 instead of 200. Does it make sense to implement that? Unfortunatly that would be quite hard for us. Maybe Google would also spend more time then on pages that actually changed, instead of wasting it on unchanged pages. Do you have any other suggestions, how we can reduce the traffic of google bot on unrelevant pages? Thanks for your help Cord0 -
Does daily changing of price information in a title tag damage SEO?
Hi I'm thinking about changing the title tag for all my pages daily, updating it with the most current price information. (As I think this could improve CTR) All the other keywords in the title tag would remain the same however. Does anyone think this is likely to cause a problem with regards to ranking in Google and other search engines? Thanks for any / all replies! Cheers
Technical SEO | | joeprice0 -
Site Change of Address - best method?
When changing domains, there's the obvious anxiety about sacrificing the value of your old domain. A client recently changed domains, immediately killed the old site (did everything properly with 301s, Webmaster Tools etc etc etc) and lost rankings completely for weeks. Turns out the site had been 'burnt' by the previous owner and it took a reconsideration request from Google before things recovered. Cost them rankings and cash with extra PPC spend. My question is: In order to avoid this potential hazard, what are your thoughts on submitting a change of address in Webmaster tools, but then leaving old site live for a few weeks to see how things pan out? I have never tried it and it seems to go against the grain, but interested to hear other people's experiences and how they have managed to change domain with minimal temporary damage. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0