Changing hosts - Research confirmation.

[curly_clare]

Hi,

I've been researching into the best way of maintaining SERP's when moving a site to a new server. Could you guys please confirm that my research is correct.

·Upload a copy of the site to the new server
·Point the DNS nameserver at the new IP
·Keep a copy of the site on the old server until the new IP is identified (max. 2 months)
·Do not close the old site till the SE's start crawling the new IP (will not have 'duplication' issues as the SE's will only look at one IP for each domain)

Just a thought, would it help if all links from the site on the old server were pointing to the new IP of the new site (i.e 213.56.126.56 rather than the domain name)?

Cheers.

[jcoronella]

Looks solid to me. I would just keep an eye on the server logs on the old site to make sure noone keeps coming. Shouldn't take the full 2 months, but that's extra safe.

Just a thought, would it help if all links from the site on the old server were pointing to the new IP of the new site (i.e 213.56.126.56 rather than the domain name)?

Only if you have some sort of dynamic content that requires all the users in one place, and if so, I'd add a conditional block in robots.txt to keep the bots off the IP (tricky, but can be done with .htaccess)

[isitreal]

I'm still getting hits on a section of a site I took down about 6 months ago, probably coming in from old broken links and minor search engines.

[PatrickDeese]

> I'm still getting hits on a section of a site I took down about 6 months ago, probably coming in from old broken links and minor search engines.

But is that a change of domain name, or a change of servers for the same domain name?

[isitreal]

Yeah, sorry, I misread his post, I thought he was changing domain names, changing the IP address of the server is done I think in about 1 week max for all DNS, so 2 months would obviously be way more than adequate.