I own a wordpress based site that is hosted with Yahoo! and I've been very happy with the search results achieved (in all major engines). I have left this site with Yahoo! for the past 18 months despite the fact that not having .htaccess has limited planned improvements to the site.
Unfortunately some recent changes in the industry this site is about require me to make a site upgrade to keep up with the competition that is overly complicated to do without .htaccess (think multi country geo-targeting etc).
It's time to move but because it was a Yahoo! hosted wordpress site it has many custom "fixes" that were designed to get around not having .htaccess such as the addition of "index.php" in the permalink structure to allow for semi-pretty permalinks.
I'm confident I can move the domain and site content to a new host and make the required changes to keep proper page uri's intact while undoing some of these yahoo! specific changes but I cannot risk losing current search rankings so I'm hesitant of the unknown right now.
Does anyone have any tips or advice that apply directly to a move from Yahoo! like this and involve maintaining the same level of search visibility?
Also, I've heard that simply moving a domain from one host to another can cause a drop in rankings, is that still a significant consideration in 2010?
Any and all stories/advice that apply to this would be most welcome.
