Moving a website’s hosting or domain

The need to move the hosting location of a website can sometimes arise and often causes webmasters some concerns about how this may affect their website on search engines. If the need also arises to change the domain name of a site there can be other considerations to minimize the impact of any move.

Firstly, if you need to move your website to a new server or hosting company, there are a number of steps that can be taken to minimize the impact that such a move may have on the way that the site is being indexed by search engines. Ideally the site should be moved to the new host location and tested on the IP address before any other changes take place.

Next, the DNS settings of the domain name needs to be changed to point to the new IP address. Once that’s all in place it’s really then a question of monitoring the activity logs for the site to see when the ‘spiders’ from each of the main search engines visit the site in its new location. This can be achieved directly through the logs or through an account with Google Webmasters or through Yahoo!’s Site Explorer of Microsoft’s Webmaster Live panel.

If there are no crawl errors then there should be no further problems and the old IP address can be closed. The new site should now be getting indexed in the new hosting location and there should be no effect on the ranking performance of the site, although moving the hosting to a new country location could have some impact on rankings within the regional versions of Google.

A more dramatic change can be when your site has to change its domain name for whatever reason, as this is much like creating a brand new website and any ranking performance that the current domain has achieved could be lost. Therefore the process of moving a site to a new domain needs to be handled much more cautiously.

Ideally you can move part of the site first, such as a one directory or section from the existing site. A ’301 redirect’ will be an essential tool to help the transition as this is a permanent redirect command that tells the search engines that your site has permanently moved to this new location. If you can see the moved pages being indexed under the new domain then this will demonstrate that the redirect is working smoothly and the whole site can then be moved by using the same process.

When using a 301 redirect you need to try to redirect each page if possible, rather than a blanket redirect to the new domain name, which will create a lot of ‘dead’ pages from the old site still being listed in the search results and so generate 404 errors. You will need to ensure that you have a tailored 404 error page for your site in the event that pages get missed and users try to enter the site from an old page which will still be listed on the search results for some time.

Next, you will need to check both the external and internal links pointing to pages on your website. For external links you’ll probably need to update directory listings or contact the webmaster of each site and ask them to update the links to point to the new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site.

You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain, particularly if the absolute domain path has been used or page names have changed as well. Once your content is in place on your new server, use an online link checker to make sure you don’t have broken links on your new site.

It will be necessary to submit and verify the new domain on each of the webmaster consoles for the main search engines, as mentioned above, and to create a new sitemap and robots file for the new domain. In the event of any problems or errors arising from the move, it’s also best to retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days so that any issues can still be resolved.

As these comments indicate, it’s really advisable not to move a large or established website to a new domain if it can be helped, but there are ways to avoid problems if you plan ahead and put all these steps into place. Moving to a new hosting location is less of a problem but still one that needs to consider the potential impact on the site’s search engine rankings, especially if these are driving a large amount of business traffic.

To find out more about either of these transfer issues and how they may affect your website, please contact us for further information and advice.

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