Help! Moving to webafrica reset my SEO

[21stcn]

Hi 21stcn,

We don't really offer support on SEO but according to some of our Hosting guys the SEO rankings will change since you moved to a new server due to the IP address changing. They have advised to best thing to do is check the Google webmaster tools which should show you where the issues will be.

Really sorry I cant be of much help but like I said this is a bit out of our scope.

Ok thanks.

You see the grey area comes in here. I realise you guys don't do SEO as you are not a emarketing company like quirk. But the way I see it, there is a possibility that this server setup for whatever reason (maybe bad rep) has undermined my SEO efforts. If this is the case, is it not reasonable to assume the server issues become your problem? IE: If it is your servers hurting the traffic of a site, then the customer has a right to complain and seek assistance for you as a server provider. I am merely trying to establish if this is the case.

Anyway I will leave it here and get on with sorting it out myself. Thanks for the replies.

[21stcn]

Hi 21stcn,

We don't really offer support on SEO but according to some of our Hosting guys the SEO rankings will change since you moved to a new server due to the IP address changing. They have advised to best thing to do is check the Google webmaster tools which should show you where the issues will be.

Really sorry I cant be of much help but like I said this is a bit out of our scope.

Ok thanks.

You see the grey area comes in here. I realise you guys don't do SEO as you are not a emarketing company like quirk. But the way I see it, there is a possibility that this server setup for whatever reason (maybe bad rep) has undermined my SEO efforts. If this is the case, is it not reasonable to assume the server issues become your problem? IE: If it is your servers hurting the traffic of a site, then the customer has a right to complain and seek assistance for you as a server provider. I am merely trying to establish if this is the case.

Anyway I will leave it here and get on with sorting it out myself. Thanks for the replies.

[Clickworks]

Ok thanks.

You see the grey area comes in here. I realise you guys don't do SEO as you are not a emarketing company like quirk. But the way I see it, there is a possibility that this server setup for whatever reason (maybe bad rep) has undermined my SEO efforts. If this is the case, is it not reasonable to assume the server issues become your problem? IE: If it is your servers hurting the traffic of a site, then the customer has a right to complain and seek assistance for you as a server provider. I am merely trying to establish if this is the case.

Anyway I will leave it here and get on with sorting it out myself. Thanks for the replies.

Why not purchase a dedicated IP for the domains in question so you can reduce the chance of the IP address being the problem?

[21stcn]

Good idea. Think I will get some dedicated ips.

[server-admins.net]

Why not purchase a dedicated IP for the domains in question so you can reduce the chance of the IP address being the problem?

If anything the dedicated IP will reside within the same range so I cant see this helping, but its a shot in the dark...

[fateh]

Interesting info shared.

[MagicDude4Eva]

A few pointers - an outage or server move will not have any SEO impact for an established site.

• Check your new IP's reputation - senderbase.org is a good starting point. Also check the IP's for any blacklistings multirbl (http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/) is a good choice here. Especially with shared hosting or bad ASN reputation you will not be able to recover.
• Check Google Safe Browsing if your domain might have become blacklisted due to following in a listed ASN (or IP)
• Check that your robots.txt is still correct - during a move this could have caused plenty of pain if all bots are disallowed
• If you don't have site maps, ensure that they are in robots.txt and are automatically submitted to Google
• GWMT is your first port of call - check crawl speed, page speed and perhaps scan your site with webpagetest.org. While not obvious, a misconfigured HTTP (i.e. ETAGS on, no caching policies or even overwriting HTTP headers could cause this
• Ensure that your Google Analytics (GA) account is still properly linked and records traffic

The above should pretty much narrow your problem down quite quickly. I do think it is either a HTTP issue (headers), robots.txt (if crawl-rate dropped) but more likely IP-address issues, provided that your site structure has not changed.

As a quick fix:

• Regenerate sitemaps and resubmit
• Pedantically go through GWMT and resolve any soft-404's or 404's by using 410's (SC_GONE) or 301 redirects.

You should have really done the following:
- Set your DNS TTL to 60 minutes
- Have your site provisioned on the new server infrastructure
- Switch A-/C-NAME records to point to new server infrastructure
- Change DNS TTL later on to a more reasonable time

During the DNS propagation (sometimes up to 3 days) some traffic will hit your new server and some traffic your old. This would have avoided any crawl issues altogether. But like I said, downtime would not affect SEO at all - unless your site was down for more than a week and even then you are able to "kickstart" it quite quickly.