Does Google Penalize You For Changing Hosts?

[LizB]

I heard on another forum that Google will downgrade your site if you cange to a new host. Can this be true? If so I can't understand why Google should care what services we buy.

[brian.mark]

It's not true. As long as you do everything correctly (keep the old site up, change the DNS entry, have the new site up for a bit before deleting the old, and leave the same site during the change) you're fine.

When people have problems, it's usually because of any number of problems.

1) Going to a "Value" host. This could mean downtime and reliability issues.

2) Old host gets shut off too soon. The bots may try to contact the old IP and see "Nothing", making them wait a few days before trying again and starting to add you back into their index.

3) Major site change. This makes the engines wonder if it is still the same site or not. Occasionally, this can mean round 2 of the sandbox.

4) New hosts that are not HTTP 1.0 compliant.

I'll explain #4 a bit more. If your site is on a dedicated IP, it's 1.0 compliant. If you move to a shared IP, that's 1.1. I was told at the last conference I went to that Googlebot in particular starts with HTTP 1.0 when indexing a new site or a new IP. This means that shared hosting could have some short term bad effects. The next times they come by, they slowly add features to their request to see how high it has to get before they get the correct results. In playing with that myself since then, it works well in uncovering cloaking.

There are a few other things that can go wrong, but that covers most of the common ones.

Brian.

[LizB]

Thanks for clearing that up- I am relieved since I recently have moved all my sites to a new host. One question -how can you leave the old site up when you get a new one since you can only have the DNS pointing to one site at a time?

[mktplace]

Just pay the old host for another month - and make sure you can get to the old site via its old IP address. . . that is what the search engines may be doing, since they may have cached an old IP address for your domain name (i.e. it can take days or longer for a DNS change to totally propogate the network, since each ISP gets to choose how often to flush the caches from their routers). See "Time To Live" or TTL parameter in routers if you want the gorry details.

[bhartzer]

Google doesn't care which web host you use. As long as your site doesn't go down when you change hosts there won't be an issue.

When changing hosts, it's best to get the new host and put all your files on that new host. Test the site to see that it's working properly (the images load, the links work, etc.). Then, change the nameservers so that they point to the new host. Once you're convinced that everything has been moved to the new host (I like to wait at least two weeks), then cancel your old hosting.

[LizB]

OK thanks for the info.