Will Changing The Web Host Affect Your Ranking?

One of the questions that webmasters have is whether by moving their website to a new web host affect their website’s ranking in any way. To some this might sound silly because they think why web host should have anything to do with website’s ranking. However, this is not as simple as it sounds; you need to take proper precautions while moving changing your host.

Here are few factors that you should remember to ensure that your website’s ranking is not affected in any way by changing your web host. For all practical purposes, search engines do not mind with which web hosting service provider you have your website hosted. So if all the other factors remain the same, your website’s ranking should not get affected. However, there are website owners who have lost their rankings because they have not taken proper precautions. When you are moving make sure that the URLs do not change in anyway; this assumes that you are not changing your domain name but only the web host. When the domain name and the links to all the inner pages remain the same, you will not have to worry about your rankings. In case you have been little careless while transferring your site or uploaded an older version of your site which does not reflect all your latest SEO tweaks, then you will be in for trouble. Therefore, make sure that you take a backup of the latest version of your entire site before you attempt to move the files.

If there is a change of location in the web server in which your website is hosted then, you must take into consideration your domain extension before changing your web host. If you happen to have a country specific domain name then it would be beneficial to have it hosted in the same country as the domain extension.

There are other secondary factors that you should take into consideration while moving your website. You must move your website only if you can ensure better services and server time. If you move your website to a server that goes offline or that is down very often, then your website’s ranking will be affected. Similarly if the webhost that you are moving too is black listed then your website’s rankings will drop. Therefore, you must make sure to double check before you transfer your files.

Some of the reasons why people move their web hosting include, cheaper hosting, technology compatibility after an upgrade of the site, need for better services etc. you must not rush to move your website to a different host just because you get a cheaper service. In the scale of importance, web hosts reliability will top the list before any other factor. As much as possible try not to move your website just to ensure that you don’t rock the boat unnecessarily and get into problems.

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