Ok if there is a thread on this please point me to the direction.

But have a serious issue/question.

My hosting company has decided to do a major migration to the network hosting system or what have you. In this migration it wasn't about changing server boxes it was going from one IP/DNS to another....does this have an effect with search engines? Is there damages to the rankings when this sort of thing happens?

Needless to say the site was up and down for about FIVE days during the migration and I really can't say that this was the cause of it either. After the site was back up the cache date was current and so the rankings were good. Now after 2 weeks from the migration the rankings and the link pop are dissappearing.

Has anyone experienced this sort of thing? If so be kind to share your experience.

Thanks

SeoQueen

I would not worry, I am sure it will improve soon.

The downtime can hurt, but it will improve when you are stable again.

Thanks Rusty.

Rusty, have you ever heard of an alias on a nameserver or IP? I found out that is what had happened. A quick fix to get the site live on a short notice. Not exactly sure how all that works but I can believe having an alias could do some damaging results in SE's? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks

seoqueen

When using aliases (I believe Apache does this) it is basically a redirection. Someone types in www.site.com and they are redirected to a different domain but the URL in the address bar does not change.

In my experience this is not a good thing in the long run. I guess it depends on how it is used. I have seen it done resulting in duplicate content issues but, as I said there may be a perfectly good reason if it was done, particularly if it was done as an interim measure.

Amye

When using aliases (I believe Apache does this) it is basically a redirection.

Looks like it can be done on windows platform as well.

In my experience this is not a good thing in the long run. I guess it depends on how it is used. I have seen it done resulting in duplicate content issues but, as I said there may be a perfectly good reason if it was done, particularly if it was done as an interim measure.

Amye

It's not a good thing as I've found out....

I assume it was done for a quick fix to get my site live while getting the NS change (I don't know much of this) and it has been forgotten about until I've noticed some weird things happening with our rankings in Google. I did take a huge hit from this and now I am are trying to get back what I had.

During this process although it was only 3 weeks that this alias thing was setup I've noticed my BL's have dropped tremendously, lost all rankings for my favorite keywords but what caught my eyes in the first place is that all of a sudden Google couldn't find my sitemap for their beta program. This prompted Google to do a rollback of displaying old pages, none title tag links with no description, etc. Thought it was odd and that prompted me to investigate.

Since it's only been a few days since this has been fixed the right way, most of my rankings are coming back but our BL's and non title links with no descriptions in Google are still a mess.

Thought I'd pass along my experience.

Thanks for the reply's

seoqueen :D