Gary Illyes from Google answered the most common question for website owners: does changing web hosting platform result in a negative outcome for rankings and SEO? It is a reasonable question because when switching web hosting providers, the technical infrastructure and server capabilities are crucial in determining website performance. A poorly optimized hosting environment can lead to slower loading times, negatively impacting user experience and SEO.
Does Changing Web Hosting Platform have negative effects on SEO?
If you are considering switching hosts for your website, you might ask: “Would switching web hosts have a negative and lasting effect on our SEO rankings?”
Search Engine Journal elaborated on the response of Google’s Gary Illyes about the effects of changing web hosting to SEO rankings:
“If you do things by the book, meaning the website keeps being resolvable and the actual downtime is minimal, changing hosts should not have negative effects on your pages’ rankings in Google’s search results.”
Why Google’s Gary Illyes’ response about the effects of changing web hosting to SEO rankings reasonable:
In simple terms, when Google’s Gary Illyes’ says that changing web hosting shouldn’t harm your SEO rankings if you follow proper procedures, he means that as long as your website remains accessible and the downtime is brief, there shouldn’t be a negative impact on how your pages rank in Google’s search results. This is reasonable because Google’s primary goal is to provide users with the most relevant and high-quality content. If your website is temporarily unavailable due to a hosting change but quickly becomes accessible again, Google understands that this downtime is often necessary maintenance rather than a reflection of the content’s quality or relevance.
Essentially, as long as you handle the hosting change smoothly and ensure minimal disruption to your website’s availability, Google will likely continue to recognize and rank your pages based on their content and relevance to users’ search queries. It’s all about maintaining the integrity and accessibility of your website during the transition, ensuring that Google’s algorithms can still crawl and index your content effectively.
Google’s Gary Illyes: Understanding the Effects of Switching Web Hosting to SEO Rankings
Based on Google Gary Illyes’ response, we notice that Gary mentioned two factors to be mindful of when changing web hosting:
1. Website domain resolves
2. Downtime is minimal
Let’s break down the two that he mentioned:
1. Website Resolvability: Ensuring that your website remains resolvable means that when users type in your domain name, it leads them to the correct IP address where your website is hosted. This involves updating the Name Servers (NS) information at your domain registrar and ensuring that the A Record accurately reflects the new hosting IP address. Essentially, it’s like updating the GPS coordinates to your website’s new location on the internet.
2. Minimal Downtime: Minimizing downtime is crucial for maintaining user trust and search engine visibility. Swift recovery from downtime incidents is key. Whether it’s due to hardware failures, server misconfigurations, or security breaches, minimizing downtime ensures that your website remains accessible to users and search engine crawlers. Google typically takes a couple of weeks to recrawl and reindex your web pages after a downtime incident, so the sooner your site is back online, the faster it can regain its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
In conclusion, Gary Illyes’ response from Google provides reassuring clarity for website owners contemplating a switch in web hosting providers. It underscores the importance of executing the transition seamlessly to minimize any negative impact on SEO rankings. By emphasizing the need for continuous website accessibility and minimal downtime, Illyes offers practical guidance for maintaining visibility in search engine results. Ultimately, adhering to these principles ensures that the integrity of the website remains intact during the hosting change, enabling it to continue ranking based on content relevance.
