Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
Michael Martinez: If your site goes offline for an appreciable period of time, it can hurt data collection.But if you put the site up on the new server, wait a couple of days for DNS to update, and then disable the old server, you should be okay. I don`t recall running into any analytics collection issues in over 20 years of moving sites around.
Nithin Km: As per the location, the search terms would be changed ?
Al Jones: Changing server location (or data center location) might affect your SEO in the following ways:Site Speed: Depending which hosting company (cheap vs hardware and software setup on new hosting server), your site speed might get affected, thus affecting your SEO. If you are a local business, I recommend that you host your website at a local datacenter or close to the city your target audience is when possible.Local SEO: There has been some strong evidence to show that the IP address (geo-location) of a website can affect the rankings of the site. Note: Some SEOers believe that search engines use server location as a ranking factor. However, this has not been proven yet.For instance, if your website has an Assigned IP address belonging to the wrong country, that might affect your ranking.However, I do believe that if you have a .com.fr or a .com.uk domain name, but your web hosting server and its IP address are located in the US, Google, and other major search engines would figure that out, thus, not hurting your SEO campaign.I hope this helps.
Michael Martinez: The IP address almost never affects Website rankings. It can be used by Google News to force a choice between similar articles from the same source, but that`s an option, not a foregone conclusion.In very rare cases Google will deindex all the content from a single host, but behavior must be egregious. In such situations, other hosts on the same IP address will be unaffected.
Does changing server location affect google search console & google analytics data?
