WIll a hosting change affect my ranking in google

[river_east]

Currently we host all of our sites internally. We are about to outsource this service. My concern is that moving the sites targerted to SEO may have an negative effect on our positions in google. Does anyone have any insight from a similar move either positive or negative?

Thanks in advance

[Tropical Island]

It should present no problem if you do it right.
Arrange for new server.
Do NOT make DNS changes.
Upload site content to new servers.
Keep old servers running.
Test new sites to make sure they are working and all links are active. Use a link checker service to run through the sites to double check.
Once you are sure that everything is OK then make the DNS changes.
Leave your old servers connected for at least two weeks (or more) or until you are sure that G, Y & MSN have followed the DNS changes and are now spidering your new server exactly like the old one.
You will also see a corresponding decline in traffic to the old server.
When there is no traffic to the old box you can disconnect it.

Good luck - hope everything works out OK.

[river_east]

great info thanks

What about a ip change potentially causing any problems

[inbound]

IP changes can cause a problem if they are seen to involve a change in the country the server resides in. That's not likely to happen in the US (although watch out for Canadian services being sold as if they are US, and vice-versa)

In the UK, there is a real problem with this as one of the larger hosts is from Germany. Many sites work perfectly well being hosted abroad because the have .co.uk domains and plenty of UK inbound links, however that's not sufficient evidence to take a chance on.

Check out where the IP range of your new servers will appear to be from and then follow the previous advice from TropicalIsland.

[river_east]

our ips right now are Canadian and will be switching to us based ips. Hoping to gain ground in us searches ie st louis widegets and not lose any position on specific searche ie widegets. Currently have strong positions for Canadian specific searches but don’t really care if those lose ground.

[CainIV]

I have found that you should leave the current hosted files where they are for at least two weeks once you have changed servers and changed the nameservers.

Changing to a U.S. based host (Arizona) impacted us in a positive way in U.S. com based searches for keywords (went up in all keys) (we were hosted by a Western Canadian company before)

PM me if you need details re the actual host.

Cainer

[rainborick]

There's some useful information on this topic in Google's help for webmasters at [google.com...]

[river_east]

thats great on both accounts thanks.