Monday, January 5, 2009

Moving Your Website to New Server - Checklist

When you have decided to change your server / IP address of your website for some reason, you need to follow some instructions which will help you to keep the website clean and easy to crawl in the eye of search engines. This will further help you hold up the rankings for the targeted keywords in all major search engines.

1. Make sure all your files tested and kept ready on the new server for the launch. This will help you eliminate the chance of getting your site into server down time.
2. Do not change any URLs.
3. Make sure your files does not have capitalization issues. Since some servers are case sensitive and these servers will make issues when you have capitalization issues with the files.
4. If necessary apply 301 permanent redirection.
5. Check with free online link checker and make sure you don't have any broken links.
6. Keep your old files accessible on the old server for a period of time after the switchover. This will allow websites and search engines to update their caches.
7. Make repeated test. After site launch, run a "site:www.mysite.com" search on Google and click on the links to be sure that everything is behaving just the way you and your potential customers expect.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Our web host is changing to a cloud environment. Won't changing from dedicated IPs to cloud IPs damage our search rankings?

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