We all change our web hosts often, there are many reasons for this. Reasons like:
1. You used a free web host and now you to want to upgrade.
2. You used a cheap web host but since you started to make money, you want to upgrade to a better web host.
3. Your blog’s traffic increased, so you are migrating to a VPS or dedicated server.
There are many such reasons like these and many people have their own reasons as well. Changing web hosts became inevitable. This rises an important question whether changing web hosts will cause any SEO problems?
Will Changing Web Hosts Cause Any SEO Issues?
Each and every server has a unique IP address, just like we have a phone number or social security number. When we change our web hosts, the IP addresses will also change and the site also faces some downtime. We often worry whether this will cause any SEO issue. We have an interesting question and also an interesting reply from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team.
Fernando C from Spain asked, “We are a pretty big site. We are changing our hosting company in the next few weeks (same country). Should we be scared from an SEO perspective?”
Matt Cutts’s Reply To This
Matt advises us to lower the timeouts (TTL – Time To Live) on your DNS, say like 5 minutes. A website’s downtime, if it is very long, may affect your rankings. You can also keep the content active on your old host and once your old traffic goes to your new host fully, you can delete your old content there.
LEARN: Migrating To A New Web Hosting Account Without Downtime
So we conclude that it is ok to change web hosts and we don’t actually need to worry about SEO. Follow the advice he mentioned in the video and things will become much better.
