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Our company’s html web site drives a lot of interest. We are happy with our listings and traffic driven form Google, Yahoo and other search engines. However, the website is growing and we are not able to maintain it using only static pages. To meet our customers’ needs we must rebuilt web site completely using ASP and database. That means also to change Web Hosting, and IP address. Is that transmission might hurt our listing?
How to make the transmission as smooth as possible? Thank You! Gunter
1) Get a new hosting account - don't submit it to Google or anyone, just get the webspace and the technology you need to develop. Keep your old site up and running untill the new one is completely ready to take over.
2) Develop the new site. Do keep a 404 on the index page while you are developing or make one of those annoying "under construction" pages. Preferably don't make anything available on the web. You could eg. make a special subdirectory for development and keep that one access restricted using passwords.
3) As you are changing from static to dynamic, your file-names and URLs will not be the same on the new site. Make a strategy for what will happen when a user types in an URL that no longer exists. Preferrably one that will point him towards the new location of the same page (or the nearest similar page). Make a clear hierarchy of your new site, eg. a preliminary sitemap, and follow that.
4) Do a site-search here on WebmasterWorld for "dynamic URL" or "Static URL" (see link at top of page) - make sure the URL's you return on the new dynamic site are not filled with parameters, querystrings or session-IDs. Google is quite good at handling these issues (except for Session-IDs, those should always be avoided), but it's not perfect - other search engines are not as good as google, so do keep those URLs simple.
5) Make the change. If your preparation has been good and thorough, this will be the least problem. Just make the new site "live" and point your domain to the new server. That'll probably do it for Google, the other search engines might like "301 redirects" (search this forum for it) or similar employed at your old site, and as this helps Googlebot too it might be a good idea.
Here's a thread for you on (5): Site change of URL [webmasterworld.com]
It's more or less the same things you must consider when changing hosts, as when you are changing URL. Still, if your preparation has been thorough you will see few problems.
Also, the section Google Information for Webmasters [google.com] on the Google website has some good advice, even some that is not only Google-specific.
Hope this helps.
/claus
