Thread: Is ranking affected by hosting change?

I am not sure how to ask this -

If someone has a website hosted (and built) with some other-than-vodahost company and they change their hosting to Vodahost, will they lose anything they have gained in the way of page ranking because of this change?

And would transferring the domain name, or not transferring, but instead redirecting to Voda have any effect on ranking?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

No.....ranking is domain specific, based on the website as presented online (has nothing to do with WHO is hosting it).

Originally Posted by Vasili

No.....ranking is domain specific, based on the website as presented online (has nothing to do with WHO is hosting it).

Thanks, Eric, I thought so, but didn't want to pass on that information without knowing for sure.

Can I just add a caveat to that as we just went thru this.
Transferred into VH and Vasili is right for the main domain - we suffered no loss of PR in the transition but we had to rebuild the site and all the pages within the site had to be renamed.
In that case the SEs will have cache of all those pages and when they crawl again they will report a ton of 404s which will affect your ranking unless you've entered all the old page names as Disallows in your robots.txt. This is now made easier by the new change to robots.txt where you can specify your sitemap and the spiders will only index the pages in your sitemap.
You will also lose ranking, of course, in the renamed pages as they won't be found.

If you're keeping the same page names you should be fine.

Originally Posted by Winntec

Can I just add a caveat to that as we just went thru this.
Transferred into VH and Vasili is right for the main domain - we suffered no loss of PR in the transition but we had to rebuild the site and all the pages within the site had to be renamed.
In that case the SEs will have cache of all those pages and when they crawl again they will report a ton of 404s which will affect your ranking unless you've entered all the old page names as Disallows in your robots.txt. This is now made easier by the new change to robots.txt where you can specify your sitemap and the spiders will only index the pages in your sitemap.
You will also lose ranking, of course, in the renamed pages as they won't be found.

If you're keeping the same page names you should be fine.

Thank you so much for the information.

And, if at all possible - keep all the same page names - and try to never change a name to a page. If a page is no longer viable, you might want to make it an information page that could keep the same name and help the website in another way.

Thanks Beth. I didn't know that. Fortunately that part was done right in the first place; the site is just not so great visually.