Keep Positioning after Transfer

I have a website that has a really good possitioning among search engines (yahoo, google, etc.) that good positioning gives me an davantage over others in terms of incoming traffic. I am planning first to migrate that website from its current server to another one.
Will that affect my search engine positioning? I will keep the same domain but im going to transfer it from one host to another.What can I do to keep my search engine positioning?

The physical location of your web site has nothing to do with nor will it have any affect on your rankings.

They are purely based on the quality of your web site and the other off-page things that affect rankings.

You are quite safe to move.

Yes Geoff is right...the only thing I heard...which I heard from Rob...was if you are hosted on a UK server you can get listed in the google.com search engine, and also the google.co.uk search engine...thought I would pass that bit of info on...lol

Just make sure before you switch the DNS, have the other host up and running with your website on it. Having downtime could hurt your rankings.

Yeah, so you kinda have two websites...but in order to do that your new host would have to give you a dedicated IP address...who is your new host?

The definitive answer to your question is that it CAN hurt your rankings/indexing, unless done properly.

Let me explain the basics of Google/SE's and you will understand my point.

Google does not see your website as a domain name, it sees it as an IP address.

Scenario

If your website name is domain1.com and you are hosted by myserverhost.com with a DNS of 195.7.221.34 ...

When the google spider visits your site, it knows (from DNS), that domain1.com is on IP address 195.7.221.34 - therefore it goes to 195.7.221.34 and then looks for your domain name. Then it finds your website.

When you change host (which usually (100%) means changing nameservers) there can be a period where all of the DNS servers on the web have not refreshed (with the right IP address/dns settings) and therefore google (or visitors/spiders/etc.) can be delivered to the old or new site. If you've closed your account with your old host this can be a night mare as the site isn't "resolving" and can hamper your rankings if GoogleBot is looking for you.

So what happens if I need to change servers/hosts? or how can I prevent myself from having problems?

The best way to do this is to put an identical a copy of your website on your new host/server. Remember to keep the existing host up and running

Test the website on your NEW host and make sure all is functioning the same.

You then change the DNS of your site to the new host.

e.g. domain1.com was on dns1.myserverhost.com and dns2.myserverhost.com

change this

domain1.com is now dns1.myNEWserverhost.com and dns2.myNEWserverhost.com

This then covers any eventuality that the visitor/spider may get either site. Cool, I hear you say

Then you keep the old website up until the spiders and/or visitors STOP visiting it and you can see them on the new site only. You can check this in your log files (this is another post)

From my experience this is the DEFINITIVE way to avoid errors and to prevent problems with the SE's.

If anyone has something else to add, I'd be happy to hear

I would just like to point out, that stu is perfectly correct, and is really the only way to avoid hiccups.

If you are changing domains also, then you can ditch all the content on the old host, and instead place a 301 redirect in your old host .htaccess file to redirect old content to new - this is of course if your url structures will remain unchanged. If they are changing, then you have some serious, custom rewrite rules to look at - never fun, but needed to preserve rank.

__________________
Rob - SEO Specialist
Owner & Founder of Webforumz.com

I am currently unavailable for private work

Any sites hosted in the UK have the added benefit of showing up for UK only results - google can tell very easily - just as anyone here could, where a site is hosted.

I guess hosting in the uk is a define benefit because from webforumz logs, I can tell you at least 400 visits a day to this site are from uk only searches. not bad.... as a bonus anyway.

__________________
Rob - SEO Specialist
Owner & Founder of Webforumz.com

I am currently unavailable for private work