I operate a ecommerce site that is currently hosted by yahoo. I will be moving it to a different ecommerce provider. I know I will not be able to keep all my current rankings, but what are the essential steps to take when switching hosts seo wise. Do your best to keep all your site pages alive as before.
So all search engine robots can crawl all of your site. switching servers is a potentially massive operation. If the new host needs to change any urls ensure you have 301s for this and test everything as soon as you switch. Depending on your target market, it may have a positive influence too, but will take time. Expect to see a drop, then a slow recovery (assuming you're moving up in the hoting, not down!).
So all search engine robots can crawl all of your site. switching servers is a potentially massive operation. If the new host needs to change any urls ensure you have 301s for this and test everything as soon as you switch. Depending on your target market, it may have a positive influence too, but will take time. Expect to see a drop, then a slow recovery (assuming you're moving up in the hoting, not down!).