The next set of questions regarding site migration comes from Austria. The first is an inquiry as to whether relocating from a server to the cloud (like Amazon S3 or the Google App Engine) will have a negative effect on a site’s listings. The second is a follow-up concerning the effectiveness of manual geographic targeting in correcting any possible confusion.

Matt Cutts makes is it clear that crawlers like the Googlebot deal only with what the server returns. They are not aware of the things which might be happening behind the scenes like the use of a certain programming language (PHP, Pearl, Python, or Ruby on Rails), the way a page was created (static or dynamic) used, or any sort of communication with the cloud. Web crawlers are only concerned with the site content.

Cloud migration is usually partial with a web server still holding everything together, in which case listings should not be affected. However, in full migrations it is possible for the Googlebot to have some confusion regarding IP address. An example would be a site which was previously hosted in Germany but now uses cloud services from the US. In order to maintain high rankings for German searches, Matt recommends setting the geographic target on Webmaster Tools accordingly.

Video Link:

Can moving my website to “the cloud” harm my listings? –