Search engine traffic and server migration

[chandrika]

Last week all my websites were migrated to a new server, a better server, there were a couple of glitches and the sites were down twice for a twelve hour period each time over a few days.

Since the day they migrated, traffic on two of the sites has dropped from 3000 uniques a day, to under 1000 a day, which is a bit devastating.

The sites all remained on the old server to take account of any time it took for name server propagation, everythin seems to have migrated ok, so I am trying to figure why traffic dropped over night so considerably.

Maybe just a coincidence, but it was the day of the migration and so I wondered would those two periods of downtime have had such an effect, or does changing the ip have some affect. The sites are still hosted in same country, I am hoping it is a temporary glitch, does anyone have any advice about this? Can I expect that with time the sites will pick back up again?

[incrediblehelp]

Well Google (and other SE's) do not like to have dead pages in their index. They understand sites do go down and they will be back crawling and your traffic should come back if that is truly why the traffic went down in the first place. Just check and make sure you actively getting spidered right now.

[visio]

what probably is happening is that the traffic is being divided between the 2 servers, I have noticed that when you change IP's or nameservers, or servers as in this case, some internet providers specially from Asia are very slow on updating the dns, so for days and days some people continue to go to the old site.

[CKarsting]

It may be a bit late for this information, but I have used the recommendation at this link: bruceclay.com - Technical Search Engine Optimization Tips and SEO Tips and had very good success with keeping SEO rankings. I am going to be moving a major site of mine this month, so any additional tips on this would be extremely helpful. Make sure you have all of your old ip's forwarded properly and that the traffic shock is just temporary (until the SE find and reindex all of your pages). Best of luck, Chad Karsting Webmaster Folsom Chevrolet Dealer in the Folsom Automall Sacramento California

[morestar]

i've seen this before and you're site will rock again in less than two weeks

get two links into it too, two new ones...

[iaccess]

The last time I moved a site a few months back, we saw no dip in traffic or keyword rankings. I have seen rankings/traffic drop due to extended outages or unreliable sites, however. So, I suspect it is your outage that has caused the drops, or perhaps as noted above traffic is (was) still going to both hosts due to DNS migration.

Give it a week or two and you should be back to where you were. If not, you will need to look for other factors, such as a penalty on your new IP (if it is a shared hosting facility, or whoever had that IP in the past had a penalty), or differences in your host implementation.

[edhan]

This should be only temporarily effect of changing servers. If you are using your own DNS then it is likely to resolve soon. From the situation, your drop might be due to previous server that has downtime. Once everything is switched over to the new server, things will be back to normal.

[subsystems]

Somebody correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't a 307 redirect to the new server be a good idea?
That is to say have all requests to mysite.com temporarily redirect to new.mysite.com.

The advantage of doing it this way is the spiders will know there is a change but not to make any permenant changes to their spider lists. So they won't start mucking with things.

General idea...
1. Setup new host A Record pointing to new.mysite.com on new server.
2. Get website running on new.mysite.com
3. Redirect all pages on old.mysite.com using 307 redirect to corrisponding pages on new.mysite.com
4. Change host old.mysite.com to point to IP of new server new.mysite.com
5. When all traffic is finished with old server, remove site from old server.

The advantage here is 2 fold. Your visitors are forwarded to the new server immediately without waiting for the dns propogation. Also, the spiders know not to change things and just get the content from the new location. Yet in both cases once the dns propogation is complete both the visitors and the spiders will be going to the new server under the old name and will not be redirected because the new server was not setup to redirect only the old server was.

Hope that makes sense.

The reason not to just rely on dns propogation is because things like shopping carts will get split between servers. Some orders will be on the old server some on the new server. You may end up with duplicate shopping cart nubmers etc. Makes for an administrative pain.

[seo4china]

I would say just give it time...

[culartnet]

It happened to my site after a week, when rankings get dropped after server changed. Also i changed my server from UK to US based.
Hopefully keyword ranking and traffic will be back soon.

[edhan]

If there is no change in your website when you transferred, then it should be back to normal. But if you have made changes, then the ranking will be affected.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by visio

what probably is happening is that the traffic is being divided between the 2 servers, I have noticed that when you change IP's or nameservers, or servers as in this case, some internet providers specially from Asia are very slow on updating the dns, so for days and days some people continue to go to the old site.

I've seen this happen a lot when we are moving sites. I'd give it a week or two and everything should go back to normal.