Can server moves do more harm than good?

Hi guys

I recently designed a .co.uk gaming domain, and when I made it, I had it on US hosting, I finished the site, built some backlinks and so forth. Anyway, within a month, it had some page rank, and was nearly on page one.

I thought that moving it to a UK host would make the site load quicker, and would be much better for SEO purposes. I recently moved the site over to the UK just a week ago, and all my ranks have completely gone. For one SERP I have gone to 657 from 11.

My thought was, perhaps it was crawled whilst it was being moved, and perhaps when it is crawled again, it may reindex. Though, I am keen to here what anybody here thinks

Cheers

I have done quite a few server moves over the years and normally find that the loss of positions is just a temporary situation and they should return back to normal within a few weeks - sometimes within days.

As long as the servers actually are in the UK and no other problems have occured, such as the panda or penguin updates, then it should only be a short term blip. give it a couple of weeks before you start to worry

Just checked my ranks, and they have gone from being absolutely dire this morning, to being very good at time of writing. So it was about 6 days then....thanks for you replies though guys :-)

That's really fast 6 days.. Cheers for letting us know and glad you got your ranks back :)

Always keep in mind when you are doing server moves that there are many factors to consider.

Are you moving from a US host to a UK host....that is very different from moving from one server in an operations center to another server in an ops center.

Are you planning the move carefully to insure your downtime is zero, or at least to a minimum?

I have just recently completed a HUGE server move.

This move was unavoidable since the facility I was in was closing and was planned as carefully as I was able to based upon the short amount of time I was given to move my entire infrastructure (dns servers, switches, mail servers, web servers, sql servers, load balancers, even the racks themselves), as well as help design and configure the infrastructure of the new facility we moved into.

The best I can tell the move itself, including moving to a completely new set of IP's did not affect ranking much if at all. Downtime was zero for all of my clients, zero for the bulk of my sites, and less than 2 hours for the remaining sites (it would have been 45 minutes but I lost a motherboard in the one server that I had to physically move into the new location).

We have discussed this here before so it is always a good discussion. What I learned in the discussions of the past I put to use during this recent move and made sure that downtime was zero when possible and took careful planning.

I put up new dns servers FIRST!! at least a week before the move and migrated ns1 and ns3 to the new ip's and let them get friendly with top level at least 6 days before moving the first domain.

I then put up new web servers and had the sites ready on the new servers before making the dns change so when I changed the ip in the a records the change would be immediate for most visitors but any visitors that would get the old ip's the old servers would continue to answer for a few days just in case and for those visitors that go through routers that had the old ip's cached. This meant zero downtime no matter which server a visitor was sent to.

Now I did NOT change geographic locations, although the traffic is now going through "some" different routers since we moved about 5 miles. All IP's changed (at the class b level) since the provider that was doing the routing for the classes would not let control of them go. And my public switch is now a few hops closer to the backbone.

Overall I will say that that month (March) was the second most stressful time I have had to endure the past few years, but without careful thought and planning it may not have gone as smooth as it did.

Rick
Universal4

Sorry, my erminology was perhaps not correct.

I moved from an American host to a UK host. Thanks for the advice though Rick

No problem, and server moves is something we have discussed here a few times over the years.

It is always good to ask questions about this kind of stuff in advance and get ideas and tips from those who have gone through it to help you remember some of the small stuff or things you may not have considered.

And when you are under time constraints, being in control of your dns really helps a lot, since dns changes (once replicated to the "actual" dns servers) are in real time depending on the time to live and expiration records. When I am planning a major move I usually lower these well in advance (which increases dns queries) but it forces lookups to the authoritative dns servers more often for fresh results which speeds propagation.

Rick
Universal4

I also just completed a site move to a co-location set up and so far I love it.

Best advice I can give about a server move is the basically the same as Rick's, just make sure your site is fully functional on the new servers before you change the Nameservers.
It took me almost two full weeks to get everything up and running, before I changed the Nameservers. Amazing all the little things that can cause big problems...

@lowrisk,
As long as you tell google, in WMT, your targeting the US market(or the UK market), it really doesn't matter where your server is physically located.

I also made a server move. It was from the US based hosting company GoDaddy to UK based StableHost.

What I did was keep the first and second Name Servers of GoDaddy and add as third and fourth the ones of StableHost. Then in my Windows Hosts file I changed the IP address I want to use when I visit my website URL. This is needed while I set up the website on the second server and also that when I move the website link structure is working.

This insured zero downtime for my visitors, because when I was sure everything is completely working on the second server I just removed GoDaddys Name Servers and kept only StableHost. Everybody that visited my website via the direct URL was going to the website on StableHost without noticing any change or downtime.

Thanks for all your help guys, with a bit of luck I'll know better for next time,

I moved two sites, both from the same US host, to the same UK host....

I had a small database error with one, and funnily enough...That is the one where the rankings dropped significantly, so I am wondering if maybe it was crawled while it was being moved, or while the error was there, as it took an hour to resolve.

Anyway, thanks or all your advice and words of wisdom. Hopefully next time I will be better prepared