[CarmaCreative]

Hello all,

I have recently made a somewhat disastrous move to advise a client to switch hosting provider. It has caused no end of problems with FTP, emails, accounts and so on.

But perhaps the biggest problem is when the site transferred to the new hosting company any trace of a Google Pagerank disappeared. The website has been online for many years and as such the owner is very unhappy that he is now on page 2, instead of his old position of page 1.

Does anyone have experience of this and why it has been dropped instantly from Google?

Thanks,
Phil

[Boss Hog]

Where are the servers based of the new hosting company? How long ago did you move the site, very recent?

[CarmaCreative]

Hello,

The site was FTP'd again just over 2 weeks ago. The hosting company is based in Newbury, Berks, but I know that's not necessarily where the servers are based too.

[Boss Hog]

To be perfectly honest I am not 100% sure, I thought maybe the new server was in the US or something, just guessing to be honest. Let things settle and see what happens in another couple of weeks.

When we swapped from shared hosting to our dedicated server we saw no change in our positioning so it may just be one of those things where your site was going to go onto page 2 anyway

Maybe somebody else has some idea....anyone?

[Logopro]

Tell your client to wait a week or two before stressing out, it may be that some of his traffic was coming from some links which may have changed when you swapped servers (ftp traffic etc.)

Also, like Boss said, it may be that he was about to drop to page 2 anyway..

[CarmaCreative]

Thanks for the help anyway.

It just seems crazy to me because as soon as the old hosting had stopped it had vanished from Google Pagerank as I said. I didn't realise it would be as instant you know.

[CarmaCreative]

Thanks for the advice again, at least I have a bit more info that I can pass on, where as previously it was zilcho...

[Logopro]

The point is nobody really know why and how google works, the reason your pagerank dissapeared probably has something to do with the change of server IP and if his site hasn't changed it should be back before long.

[JohnRoss]

Originally Posted by CarmaCreative

But perhaps the biggest problem is when the site transferred to the new hosting company any trace of a Google Pagerank disappeared.

Undeniably odd but, how do you know? None of the public indicators like the PR shown on the Alexa toolbar is really very reliable.

I suppose it's possible that a change in the IP could have an effect if most traffic is coming from a particular geolocation, though I don't think it should in theory. I know there is a theory going round that Google penalizes slow-loading pages, but I haven't seen much hard evidence for it. Anyway, there's no point fretting about PR for its own sake, the nitty gritty is really whether there has been an effect on traffic.

Does anyone have experience of this and why it has been dropped instantly from Google?l

Oh, yes, happens all the time. The number one killer is getting hacked by phishers, it's the kiss of death. And if it does happen once, it'll happen again - once they're in, they're in, you have no option but to change host and do a clean install (i.e., not from backup, though databases are not usually affected, as far as I know). Thoughtless linking can also have lead to a site getting downgraded for its "bad neighbours" - the fastest way to get round that is to stick a "nofollow" on all outbound links. Apart from that, the main reason for losing PR I have always found is insufficiently frequent updating together with a surge in the competition, there seems to be a snowball effect. RSS feeds are particularly vulnerable, there you are with x sites syndicating your content and providing useful inbound links, and overnight you can lose two thirds of them. And this sort of thing does tend to happen just when you are busy doing something important like changing host, precisely because you are too busy doing that to keep up with your content.

[sdesign1]

We've switched host and IP address many times with no affect whatsoever - the only way to test is to move the site again and see if the page rank comes back - I take it there were no changes to the domain or URLS?