Problems after changing host

[paulbay]

Hello, i recently changed my hosting company so my sites are now hosted on uk servers, google has picked up these changes now i think, they are listing my page like this [example.com...] without the www and no cached and i rank no where now what went wrong ive never had problems when ive changed hosting before.

[edited by: ciml at 3:06 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[OptiRex]

Bump!

so my sites are now hosted on uk servers

Are you 100% sure it is on a UK IP address?

[diddlydazz]

Hi Paulbay,

As Optirex has said you should check to see where your box is really sitting.

open a dos prompt and type tracert www.yourdomain.com

Beware: Just because an IP block is owned by a UK company it doesn't guarantee that the box is physically in the UK.

For the best answer contact your host

Dazz

<added> When I move boxes I always put something on the new box that isn't on the old box, for example, place a character (such as *) on your Index page and only upload it to the new box, check Google's cache and see if they have the page with the extra character</added>

[paulbay]

Yes done the trace and there on uk servers, on some datacenters google has my page index without the www and with the www, the one without the www has a old title which i havent used for a while

[inbound]

You can set up your server to redirect requests so that they always have www. infront of them.

I know how to do this on Apache/Linux but not on any other platform. The code below should do it, it needs to go in a file called .htaccess and be placed in the document root for that site or the document root for the whole server, putting one file in the main web document directory is usual but beware that if you place more .htaccess files closer to your content then they will overide the main one.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^yourdomain/(.*) [yourdomain.co.uk...] [R=301,L]

The effect of this will issue a 301 redirect which will be picked up by Google (given time) and any user will be seamlessly redirected from yourdomain.co.uk/requestedpage.htm to www.yourdomain.co.uk/requestedpage.htm

It works a treat for me but there is a small processing overhead, as my sites are all given plenty of breathing space it's never been an issue (and they are not super busy either).

You should check out some of the general webmaster forums here to fix this if it's not Apache.

[paulbay]

in this bit RewriteRule ^yourdomain/(.*)

do i put my site in the yourdomain bit, i know i put my site in the other bits, just not sure about that bit.

Thanks

[paulbay]

That code didn't work but this one did, is this correct?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) [mydomain.com...] [R=301,L]