Many people often feel trapped with their web hosting company once they have established a website and built up a presence with it on the Internet. Basically their concerns lie in the question of whether a change of web hosts will affect their SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and it is a phone call our sales department receives daily.
To assist with this issue, we are going directly to the source and pulling information from Matt Cutts. Matt Cutts is a very important man over at Google, first making himself known by signing on as a software engineer with the company in 2000 and now working for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimisation issues. He takes the time to spell out the answers to common SEO and Google related questions in a series of blogs and videos. The video below addresses the question of whether changing a web host will affect a website’s SEO.
Long story short, moving web hosts should not cause any major issues with SEO whatsoever.
Matt explains that the domain name and information for the website remains the same. The main change will be with the IP address for the website, but even that is generally not a problem – especially if your hosting in the same country. In order to make the change to a new web host as smooth as possible, he suggests to decrease the DNS time to live (TTL) to about 5 minutes to make up for any caching that might be done to the old IP address. After that, the DNS can be changed to point to the new hosting.
Customers can contact us to decrease the TTL, and it is a common request by many that we are happy to process. We hope this helps to answer the question a bit better, and for those that still have questions, feel free to leave a comment below and we will be happy to address this further.
