Re: Moving to new server
As far as my own experiences and what I have read from representatives of various search engines and SEOs who have done migrations similar to yours, if you are doing a horizontal migration, where the site structure and content will remain the same, you should not notice any difference at all.
One of the issues that I have seen mentioned is concern over the change in IP address. Search engines cache DNS information (which maps what domains point to what IP addresses) to reduce their load on the DNS system. As a result, after a move there is a small chance that a search engine could lose your server for up to a week, possibly longer. This is extremely rare, and is preventable. The DNS system takes about 24 hours to update. After moving to the new server and adjusting your DNS entries to direct traffic to that new location, leave your existing server active for three times that duration (72 hours). At the end of that period, set the old server to respond to requests with a "Bad Request" message. This should force search engines to update their cache immediately, and guarantee that the engines get the correct new information.
The only other major issue is related to downtime. Most migration strategies address this to minimize downtime, but it is good to remember two things. First, search engines expect sites to occasionally encounter outages. A few minutes or even a few hours of downtime while migrating should not affect your rankings, although your site could, in theory, be blocked from the SERPs until the search engines see it is back online. Again, this is extremely rare, and is mostly an issue after prolonged outages. A short outage is not a reason to panic.
Second, remember your visitors. Your site may get traffic at all hours of the day, and your customers will not be as forgiving as a search engine. A generic server-generated error could lose you a loyal customer. Plan for the possibility of an outage in advance by creating a error page (in html in case there is a problem with the scripting engine) that fits the look and feel of your site, and containing a message about how you are improving the site and apologize for the temporary inconvenience. Add the following lines to your htaccess file:
#ErrorDocument 503 /absolute/path/to/errormsg.html
#RedirectMatch 503 .*
If you have downtime, simply delete the "#" at the beginning of each line. Once the issue is corrected, reapply the # and your site will resume normal operation.
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