WHY choose the UK for web hosting?: Changing host - will it affect my Google search ranking or pr?

Thursday, November 09, 2006 - Most recent posts

If its done correctly then your Google search results and/or PageRank (pr) will not be negatively affected.

The success much depends on the following:

Avoid downtime while transferring.
Changing host can be done in most cases without any interruption to your website (even a dynamic database driven ecommerce site can be transferred without loss of business if done correctly).

Choose a host that allows you to setup your website on a sub domain (YourNewSite.ontheNewWebHostsDomain) prior to transferring in your existing domain name, more details on domain transfer here.

Correctly copy all pages and folders from your old host to the new web space, then test and test again until your sure all pages are present and correct (see 2. below), only when you are happy the new site is working correctly should you transfer your domain name.

Check pages and links are correct.
You need to check all your pages are linked correctly on your new web
space and that you do not have any 404 errors (pages not found)! Xenu Sleuth is good
this this and its free, download here:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
(don't be scared it really not that scary, its a useful tool).

Also, make sure you retain the original filename and folder structure as you do not want to lose any page rankings. A common mistake made by many of the arty-farty types who create these flashy sites is to scrap the old site and replace it with their own creation which has all new page names and folder names - this is bad news as all your existing pages will be dropped from Google as they will no longer be available. Retain your existing page and folder names when transferring or redesigning your website.

Stick to your native country for hosting.

Google will list your results as per location, read why here:
is-your-website-not-listed-in-google

Google is the main search engine you should concentrate upon, you can forget trying to get traffic from other engines, you will be wasting your time. Google announced third-quarter increase in revenue of 70% to £1.4bn with £390m profit, while Yahoo profits fell 38% for the same period (source: computing.co.uk/...google-growth-continues). With that kind of income Google can sustain its position for a long time yet (personally I find this unfortunate as its not good for anyone to have a single dominating company steering our Internet).