SEO Report: Changing Web Hosts

A change of web hosting is carefully considered by webmasters who fear it will affect their search engine ranking. If all the other things remain the same, then changing your web host will not affect your search engine ranking, BUT there are number of other factors that can lead to changes and which must be considered before you change your service provider.

Of course, your web server’s uptime is crucial for your site’s ranking. If your website depends on an unreliable host, then your website’s uptime will be poor. If your website is down too often or if it times out too often before the pages load, it will frustrate your website’s visitors and search engine bots doing the indexing, affecting your traffic rate as well your indexing. When search engine bots visit your website your website should be up and running since only then they will be able to access your site. If your website is down too frequently and these outages coincide with the search bot’s visits, then it will affect your site’s ranking very badly.

You should also make sure that your website is not hosted in blacklisted servers. Blacklisted servers are servers that were healthy once but have been used for sending spam mails and for spreading malicious software and viruses. Such servers will be blacklisted by the search engines and this will create a bad hosting space, with all the websites hosted in such servers looked at with suspicion. Don’t go for hosting services just because they are cheap, for example hosting packages in eBay that are astonishingly low. They are they able to offer at such low prices because the blacklisted hosting service providers are trying to salvage what ever is possible from blacklisted servers by offering hosting for almost nothing – while the same service costs you 20 to 30 times more elsewhere. This is like paying cut rates to live in a slum with a bad reputation – you get what you pay for.  Being identified with a bad neighborhood is one of the worst things that can happen to your brand new website or a website with a good reputation and decent online visibility achieved after years of hard work.

Another common problem associated with changing your hosting service is the proper transfer of the website to the new host. Small brochure websites will not have any problem but if you own websites that are massive with thousands of pages, moving them can be a pretty complicated task. Extra care and attention is required to ensure a fully functional website without any 404 errors. Plan your migration carefully and have a backup in place so that your files are safe in case of any mishaps while transferring your website. After migration have your SEO professional do a complete scan of your website to ensure that all is performing correctly.