On Sunday morning I moved to a new webhost, trying to get a little more speed–my blog was kinda poky. Let me know if you see particular problems. Assuming nothing is horribly broken, I’ll feel fine about doing a “how to move your site to a new host and not break things in Google” post. 
Mucking about
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{ 37 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Matt,
Thanks for putting a face behind the myth…lol
I read somewhere that Google actually allows their employees to work on personal projects 20% of their day. Is this so?
If it is, I think between your personal company chef, nap time and this, I may need to apply!!
Gary
The blog seems faster and no problems. I’m in Toronto, Canada.
Site looks/feels good on my end and that post would be particuarly helpful as we are moving two major sites in two weeks. Ive done a bit of research myself, but some authoritve reinforcement would be helpful. hmm, authoritive reinforcement…Backlink…
-justin
everything seems to working fine matt. hey i was wondering what type of blogging ware you use for your php setup? thx
-jonathan
sorry for the double post but i think i answered my own question. looks like your using wordpress.
Just don’t move to a paranoid host that blocks spiders, or a snarky host that inserts links
Hah!
The host I use is out of Pitsburgh, and I find they are fantastic.
Luck!
Good idea.
Matt,
Please give us some info on the google update thats been going on various datacenters. Theres a 40 page thread on webmaster world already! You are the goto guy for this!
You mean all that webspace at google and they don’t let you host this blog there. With your skills you probably could hide this blog on their servers and no one would ever know.
When I worked at Nationwide Insurance there was a server called MIB. It was hidden, and the only to get to it was to create a hidden share with admin rights. No one else could get to it and management did not know that it exists.
I have been waiting to read instructions on how to move a site from host without losing Google’s SE rankings for the longest time. It has always been one of my biggest fears, because there aren’t any guidelines straight from Google. Your guide would be greatly appreciated!
Looks great!
I’m looking forward to seeing the debut PR update too!
Matt,
If your host does not work out I’d be willing to donate colocation space in one of my data centers in exchange for a link.
Good morning “Speedy” Matt
Yes.. your blog is much…much faster now than before..
And I see my friends here filing a wish-list. Let me add my wish then:
Talking about this one will be much appreciated.
“The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails–the best links are earned and given by choice. When I recap SES from my viewpoint, I’ll give some examples of great ways to earn links.”
Have a great sunny day
Loading a lot quicker from Germany as well. Good choice, Matt.
How about the 2 following guides:
- How to move to a new webhost without breaking Google?
- How to move to a new domain (rebranding) without breaking Google?
>> “how to move your site to a new host and not break things in Google”
I’ll settle for a “how to move your site to a new domain and not break things in Google” … please?
Your blogs looks gr8 and no probs
and he’s on page 1 on search without filters:
http://www.google.com/search?q=seo%20google%20at%20a%20for%20the%20in%20with%20on%20to%20by%20as%20seo%20google%20at%20a%20for%20the%20in%20with%20on%20to%20by%20as%20seo%20google%20at%20a%20for%20the%20in%20with%20on%20to%20by%20as%20seo%20google%20at%20a%20for%20the%20in%20with%20on%20to%20by%20as
maybe matt can comment on this query?
Feels much faster already…
Looks like you moved just in the right time, before the update happened, so even if it did have any effect on your blog it is mimimized
And anyway, moving hosts is better than changing domains for sure. BTW – please don’t think it rude or anything – but any hint as to when the update could happen? 
Nice job, it’s much faster now. To be honest, I was wondering what the problem was, and frequently left before the page loaded. I was going to offer my webhosting services free if it meant I could get your info faster!
Interesting to see that you’re now on on page 1 for google SEO, up from page 2 yesterday (according to a comment above). Not too shabby!
These results are all occurring naturally, right? No inside influence? LOL
thanks and keep up the info please
detlev – is there a thrid party watch dog site that outs hosts that participate in self serving ‘votes’.? The more exploits I see – the less I ever want to move to an un-trusted host.
Matt – Please, this would be of extreme value to myself and others – “how to move your site to a new host and not break things in Google”
detlev – According to whois.sc, Matt’s host is in Pittsburgh too.
Fast! (Montreal, Canada)
Matt,
Speaking of PHP set-ups and Google… (careening of course from JohnathanNelson’s post above)
I’m a website designer and admin for a company who, try as we might, have been suffering in SERP’s and Ranks for months.
When I came on here, we were on the first page of Google for our target keywords. At the time, all they had was some very ugly, static html, that wasnt efficient, and never got updated because…it was static.
I myself am a PHP programmer. IMO PHP is the best thing since sliced bread, and everyone agreed when we first got the new site up and running.
But ever since we moved over to PHP generated pages, our positioning dropped like a rock. I found some minor discrepancies with our query strings and made adjustments per the webmaster section on Google.com.
That helped…a bit. Eventually we ended up moving things back to a more static set up, but still maintining a .php filename (since thats what was indexed)
Still falling.
My CIO and other people keep coming up with this crazy talk that “Google dosent like PHP” and “PHP is the cause of all our problems”. I’ve explained to them that a very large amount of well-ranked, high position sites are using PHP or another similar server side language. I’ve explained how the spider only sees plain HTML whether the page was generated by the PHP engine, or hand coded in FrontPage/DreamWeaver. I’ve explained the info shown on the webmaster section of Google, about avoiding Session ID’s in the URL (id=…..) which was the only thing I read that the spider has a hard time with. I explained that it was best to keep the query string parameters to a minimum. But ultimately, everyone keeps saying “PHP BAD!!!”, and my response is ” Its all in how you use it.” and explain that we have totally ignored the fact that we need some quality content for our site, and that doing those things, should take care of the spiders, along with making sure pages are compliant code wise and well written on both front and back ends.
Still “PHP Bad” like some kinda Neanderthals.
Today, one of our reps approached me, said that one of our clients had some SEO firm in to look over their site, found it was PHP, and said “PHP is bad, Google hates it. Every site we take off of PHP and put on static HTML pages goes right to the top” or something to that effect, and presented them with some 40 page whitepaper about Google. Im trying to see if they can forward me the white paper, but I am really really doubtful that these guys are totally legit/whitehat.
Anyhow. Heres the point.
PHP and Google. Does Google/GoogleBot hate and despise PHP so vehemently as all these people are screaming at me? Or is it just misplaced blame?
Site looks/feels good on my end and that post would be particuarly helpful as we are moving two major sites in two weeks
http://www.directorreferate.com
http://www.directorreferate.com/referate/romana/93/romana2.php
http://www.directorreferate.com/referate/romana/91/romana2.php
Site running fine here.
Please hurry and post about moving sites, I am going to have to move a site next week!
Matt,
Which host did you choose and why?
(gotta ask since i’m in the biz
)
The blog seems to be doing great. Seems like it’s loading up almost instantly. Not sure how it was before, never really paid a lot of attention since I’m waiting to read your next post.
By the way, tips for moving your site to a new host would be extremely helpful for not only me, but very informative for others.
GD
JRister, Google doesn’t penalize for PHP pages. Now if a dynamic site has pages with 15 or 16 parameters, that’s really hard to crawl. But 1-2 parameters should be quite doable.
Ben, I went with pair.com.
Matt,
How could you be on page 2 in google for “google seo” when you havent even been around long enough for a pagerank update? Shouldnt you be sandboxed? hmmmmmmm
I can save Matt some time here. To move your host without affecting Google you MUST follow these explicit instructions (though not necessarily in the order given).
1. Research your decision regarding which host to use.
2. Switch to new host of your choice.
3. Have a beverage.
It’s that simple. Switching hosts does not hurt you in Google.
I am, however, very anxious to hear about changing domains.
I keep hearing about pair being excellent from several reliable people. Seems the choice is clear for my next switch.
Awesome Matt. Thanks for the response.
Now….to convince the masses…
JRister: We had the same problem with a client recently. So far, everything I have come across indicates that Google can and will crawl PHP. Along the same line as Matt, as long as the URL doesn’t get too complex with id=?, etc., it should have no problem being found.
We built our site, http://www.sudokushop, and several other ecommerce stores with PHP and have absolutely no problem with google – in fact most of our sales come from there and we rank page 1 for many of our products and categories despite only having a PR of 1 (site only launched in October).
We do use “search engine friendly” urls, so use…
http://www.sudokushop.com/product_info.php/products_id/138
rather than
http://www.sudokushop.com/product_info.php?products_id=138
and this is one of the true powers of PHP – that is very easy to do.
sudokushop did you use mod_rewrite to make your URLs more friendly, IF so I move from apache to IIS, do you know of a way to do the same with IIS.
also this one is for Matt, Great site by the way.
We have had a site up for over a year and a half, have gotten a pretty good rank with Google, but now we want to do a face lift, we are keeping the Domain name, but we will be changing up a lot of the site, (almost a complete rewrite) and I don’t wanna lose any of my Hard earned PR, any suggestions would be great.
thanks again, and good looking out.
K
I know I just posted a commnet an All, but I had to switch to IE to post it I was using FireFox, anybody else have any problems with that???
Thx
K