Are My Search Engine Rankings Going To Take A Hit If I Switch Server Hosts?

When you've worked hard to get your site to rank higher in the search engines, you definitely don't want to do anything that is going to subtract from the effort that you've put in. If you've spent much time reading any internet marketing blog, you know how important good SEO is to your success on the web, and you won't want to put that at risk. So, if you switch server hosts for your website, is it going to equal a resulting downswing in your search engine results?

The good news is that switching hosts for your website shouldn't cause you too many problems when it comes to the rankings that your site is getting in the search engines. If there is any drop off, it should only be very slight, and very temporary, as long as you keep some things in mind. If you don't make any of the critical mistakes, you should have no problem maintaining whatever rankings you've earned prior to switching hosts.

The key to minimizing any damage that might be incurred as a result of switching your server is making sure that the site is down for as little time as possible. The longer your site is down for, the more your rankings will drop. If you have no down time, there is no reason to expect a loss.

Search engine spiders are always crawling the web. They drop a site in rankings if they find that the site is inactive. However, if they only find a site down once, and then the next time they crawl they find the site back again, the penalties will be negligible. Make sure your site doesn't go down for long, and your site will do quite well.

There is another technique which people use if they want to really take every step possible to make sure that their site doesn't lose a single beat in terms of its rankings. This is to leave the site up on both the old and the new server for a long period of time. Some people will leave both up for at least three months while they wait for all the rankings to solidify to the new server. That way, there are never any penalties assigned to the site as a result of the search engines hitting a down page, because the old site will still be there for them to hit, even while the new server is being spidered simultaneously.