Carl D.
Owner at Diamond Website Conversion. Plugging the conversion leaks in small business websites.
Web Developers & SEO's: We switched hosts for our website to increase site speed. In the process a huge swath of our page 1 keywords dropped 30 to 50 positions. Have you seen this before? Any suggestions?
We were told that when Google crawled our site the next time, it would right itself. No such luck. This problem is only on Google (not Bing). Any help greatly appreciated.
Good Answers (6)
Tom M.
Internet Technologist
Best Answers in: Search Marketing (4), Web Development (3), E-Commerce (2), Internet Marketing (1)
Carl - switching hosts in and of itself shouldn't change anything. The move should be unnoticeable to Google.
Have you changed anything - anything at all - as part of this move? Was there any downtime?
By the way, increasing the priority will not increase crawl rate. Think about it - if that were the case, everybody would just do that. If anything, it sets a priority relative to other pages on your site. See link below.
Similarly, there is no need to notify anybody about a change in host, unless you changed domain names or something, it should be completely transparent to any visitor - human or robotic.
Also similarly, use of AdWords is documented to have no impact on organic rank - at least at the level of spend of most advertisers.
Do you have a verified Google webmaster account for this site? Are there any crawl errors?
Think to yourself - what have I done, what have I changed - that Google is able to notice?
Links:
Hunter B.
PC/ Network Technician/ Independent IT Contractor/ I.T. and Systems Specialist/ Technical Writer
Best Answers in: Software Development (2), Professional Books and Resources (1), Blogging (1), Information Security (1), Information Storage (1), Web Development (1)
Have you changed the 'priority' and 'Last Mod. ' to the .sitemap file? By increasing the priority to '1', it increases the 'crawl rate'. Last Mod. should be set after the site is 're-generated' by WebTools. A good webmaster will know 'when' Google 'bots' crawl the site.
It is an assumption that the previous visitors have been notified of any site changes, after the move. Increased traffic, will build position ranking. Are you using 'AdWords'? Has 'robot.txt' file been amended to include 'Google'? Other ROR files might need adjustment or new submissions to stimulate interests.
The website IP address / hosting server location plays an important role in SEO.
To reduce the damage please make sure you are using a dedicated IP address for website.
Also you need to know what kind of hosting you have been shifted to:
Shared, VPS or Dedicated?
William T. C.
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Of course that is the end result; changing IPs will do that every time with Google. Expect to wait at least two to six months for the problem to correct provided there were not other changes beyond the IP change.
If you changed servers and you on a VPS hosting pacakge it is possible you moved to a bad neighbourhood.
Check and see using resources below what other sites are hosted on the same IP and see if they are indexed in google using site:domain.co.za command.
Added bonus is you can check which sites you are linking too and see if there are any suspicious sites.
Links:
Dave D.
Senior Web Marketing Manager at Marketing Breakthroughs
Best Answers in: Search Marketing (2), Web Development (2), Mobile Marketing (1)
IP change should not effect rankings unless you switched to a bad neighbourhood as Dewaltd indicated.
When you switched, did anything else change.
- Did the URL change at all? If so, you will need to setup 301 redirects in webmaster tools to tell google which old page urls match up with new page urls.
- Has the old site been deleted off of the old server? If not, could be that there is a DNS out there that has not updated its records. If this is the case, it may still be sending traffic to the old site, and if Google is scanning both sites, it may think that you are trying to game the system by cloning your website and thus duplicate content rules will result in a rankings drop.
This could also be caused by significant downtime in the switch, but that would rectify pretty quickly on reindexing.
