Do I need to apply a 301 Redirect when only moving a sites hosting location?

[RSVEcosse]

Hi,

I'm about to commence on a redesign of a friends web site to bring it up to date. It was completed years ago and is lacking in some areas of standards compliance as well as looking very dated. I'm planning on freshening it up and bringing it up to date.

Now, the domain name is staying exactly the same and will not be changing. As will the individual page urls. I am leaving the original web host with the email side of things and I want to just point the domain at my server IP here on EUK. My question is, do I need to apply a 301 Redirect to the page urls of the site in order to preserve built up SEO juice? The site currently ranks on page 1/result 1 on google for quite a few keyphrases and we wish to maintain that and not have to start from scratch again with the redesigned site.

I've done some reading up on the 301 issue and almost everyone (including Matt Cutts) say that 301 redirects are only really required if you are changing the name of the actual domain and wish to preserve ranking. If the domain name is staying the same (in this case it is) and its just a new server IP then 301 redirects are not required.

Would appreciate some feedback on that folks! Ta.

[Ben Stones]

Re: Do I need to apply a 301 Redirect when only moving a sites hosting location?

Hi,

I'm about to commence on a redesign of a friends web site to bring it up to date. It was completed years ago and is lacking in some areas of standards compliance as well as looking very dated. I'm planning on freshening it up and bringing it up to date.

Now, the domain name is staying exactly the same and will not be changing. As will the individual page urls. I am leaving the original web host with the email side of things and I want to just point the domain at my server IP here on EUK. My question is, do I need to apply a 301 Redirect to the page urls of the site in order to preserve built up SEO juice? The site currently ranks on page 1/result 1 on google for quite a few keyphrases and we wish to maintain that and not have to start from scratch again with the redesigned site.

I've done some reading up on the 301 issue and almost everyone (including Matt Cutts) say that 301 redirects are only really required if you are changing the name of the actual domain and wish to preserve ranking. If the domain name is staying the same (in this case it is) and its just a new server IP then 301 redirects are not required.

Would appreciate some feedback on that folks! Ta.

Hi RSVEcosse,

Great to see you on the forum again.

A 301 redirect should only be used if your domain has changed or a page has been moved to a new location. When we moved our cPanel hosting page from cpanel-web-hosting.php to /web-hosting/cpanel.php, we put a 301 redirect in place so users and bots can be redirected to the new page. In the case of search engines, it will tell them that is the new location for the page they're trying to access.

In your case a 301 redirect is neither needed nor possible since the domain and page URLs will remain the same. Unless the IP address has poor reputation, changing the IP address a domain resolves to cannot in itself harm your website SEO. It's no different to moving providers.

While there are no guarantees that taking any specific action or refraining from doing so won't harm your website's SEO, it is often more about applying common sense than anything else. Google engineers have to consider scenarios website owners may find themselves in. An IP address does not generally indicate to Google about the quality of the website it represents. If it harms website SEO to change IP addresses, people would be frantic to simply switch hosting providers or upgrade from one hosting product to another in cases where the IP address has to change.

I hope this helps.

[RSVEcosse]

Re: Do I need to apply a 301 Redirect when only moving a sites hosting location?

Hi Ben, thanks for the confirmation on that, much appreciated.