changing website hosts...

[mipapage]

Okay, I have searched the site, but I am a bit dazed by what I have read. I am doing something very simple: changing hosts of our site. As we speak the DNS is propagating.

Will there be a problem with Google? Can We write a definative list of what to do, if there is any action that needs to be taken?

what the site search taught me was to leave the site up a bit longer in the old space, as although the DNS propagates, the bots get the news later

[edited by: mipapage at 9:04 pm (utc) on April 24, 2003]

[ogletree]

well you probably have a month before the deep crawl runs again. You picked a good time to do it. As long as Googles DNS gets your updates by the next time there should be no problem.

[mipapage]

Muchas gracias ogletree...

[Neo541]

The most important thing is to check your logs, make sure Googlebot et al have stopped going to the old site, and are going to your new site before you drop the old one.

We are going through the exact same thing, and it seems the ONLY hits the old site gets is Ms. Googlebot, everyone else has gotten the hint.

[mipapage]

Neo541, Thanks, sadly though, one of the reasons that we are changing is access to logs. Will I get dinged for duplicate content or something if the Googlebot happens to hit both spots?

[iJeep]

I changed servers at the begining of the year. Googlebot usually updates their DNS tables before a deep crawl. So if they go to the old site then they will not find the new site because they only go by what their DNS tables say. The only possibility of this happening would be if they updated their tables in the middle of a deep crawl, which I don't think would happen.

Just wait it out for a month or two, I found that G moved to the new site pretty quickly, but others that don't crawl as often were a little slower about changing.

[mipapage]

Cool,

So, keep myself in the old space until I see the deepbots hitting the new space <-- a good strategy, it seems.

Thanks!

[Neo541]

sadly though, one of the reasons that we are changing is access to logs. Will I get dinged for duplicate content or something if the Googlebot happens to hit both spots?

If you don't have access to the old logs, you'll just have to go on the new site's logs I suppose. One other thing you can do is to make your new page slightly different than your old one, so you can see which page Google is caching. But no, you won't get dinged for duplicate content, since it is the same url.

[mipapage]

Neo541, thanks, that's what I am doing. Googlebot has already hit the new space, so has MSN 'newbie'. Sadly, they hit a 'this domain hasn't moved in yet' page, my mistake. :-S