5 Reasons SEO Rankings Fall Off From Site Migration

In many situations, the digital world and the real world can be very similar. When you pack up your home and/or family and move to another neighborhood or city, there consists a certain amount of starting over. You re-associate with your new neighbors, neighborhood, city, new friends and co-workers. It takes some time to build back up to the livelihood and comfort that you may have just left. Migrating a website from one server to the other can take on similar aspects. Most websites will experience a fall-off in their rankings, until both the site and the search engines can get back to the same relationship. Many webmasters and business owners, however, like to get to the core of the problem and find a solution immediately. Here are five possible reasons for ranking fall-off after a site migration. 1. Other Sites Hosted By Same Server The search engines don’t take kindly to servers that host gambling, pharmaceuticals and adult sites, so if your website lands on a new server that has some shady neighbors, Google and other engines will begin to question your site and possibly associate it with those other sites. 2. Server Congestion Ranking fall-off could also be a question of your server’s bandwidth. Search engine spiders crawl tons of content a day and if your hosting server is overloaded and maxing out its bandwidth, there is a good chance only a percentage of your site will be indexed. There may even be a chance that you could get skipped altogether. There is nothing more frustrating than disappearing completely after a move. 3. Linking Google loves quality links. They include the relationships and patterns of your site’s links to determine how you are ranked. Google also considers links that are spread out across a wide range of networks to be more valuable, rather than a ton of links to just a few other sites. If a site is moved to a server where most of their links come from, there is a good possibility Google devalues the links in question. 4. Server Features Servers also vary from what features they support. Some servers may block certain files, folders, or URL rewrites, causing some content or features on a site to become more complex to read than they should. This will only increase the opportunity for something to go wrong. 5. Location A factor that Google takes in consideration is the physical location of servers. In general, Google is fairly skilled at determining what geographic area a website is targeted toward. If a website is moved to a different server, say, outside of the country that is was in, it may affect the local search results. This may not have a huge impact on your rankings, especially if you are doing everything else correctly, but it may be a reason for some fall off in ranking. It can be very difficult to pin point exactly what may cause a drop in rankings after a site migration. It could even be a series of events that have built upon each other. The situations discussed in this post are but a few starting points for finding the root of the problem.