Stuff happens. And when it does you need to adjust to the new circumstances—sometimes quickly and with little notice!

Of course, the trick is to smoothly make necessary changes without risking the gains you've made. In the investment world, any advisor worth their fee will tell you that preservation of capital should be your most important consideration. After all, if you lose all of your money then you have nothing to invest. For you and I in the search engine game, it's preservation of rankings!

First and foremost, you should always avoid doing anything that could potentially cause you to lose your hard-earned search engine rankings. Yet there can be circumstances beyond your control that become cause for moving a site. And, if you do it wrong, you seriously jeopardize those rankings and, potentially, your entire business could fail as a result.

In case you're asking, why would I need to move a site? Here are some of the main reality-check reasons that we've encountered over the past ten years.

Maybe your current web host...

• has unreliable connectivity,
• has placed restrictions on your operation,
• can't keep up with your online business needs,
• is financially struggling or going out of business,
• is hosting sites that are banned by the engines (i.e., bad neighborhoods).

Be forewarned: Moving a Site is Serious Business!

From looking at our tech-question correspondence, it's clear to us that moving a website is considered to be a major event for online businesses—as it should be. Unfortunately, we see that many times it has to be done in a hurry due to outages or technical difficulties with the current web host. Being prepared to move, and knowing what steps to take prior to moving a site, will smooth out the bu...