Very kind of you to take the time to pass those compliments on; thanks, Angel!

We can shake hands there, Roko 🙂 My current task favorite is Remember The Milk. For simple notes and simple lists, SimpleNote.

I agree with you in general, Roko, on the domain name change but speaking on behalf of SEP now more than Ruud Hein, we’re hesitant with changing domain names. Massive redirects can cause a dip in ranking, often temporarily but still. In-house we tend to lean towards supporting such a move by providing additional trust signals to the search engines in order to help them “realize” that the domain is legitimately and not taken over by a spammer, unrelated business, etc.

Slavi, that’s smart – start taking notes a week before. There’s less chance you’ll forget to do something.

I myself am “addicted” to to-do tasks lists. Recently I have started using Quick Notes plugin for Firefox. One simple plugin made my work much more organized and effective – it is like having multiple tabbed notepad right inside your browser. Excellent for to-do lists and notes, plus it has some extra features.

As Ruud said, changing hosts shouldn’t have any impact on rankings. Even changing domain name together with the hosting shouldn’t have any impact on rankings if redirect is properly set up so that every url from old domain points to corresponding url on the new domain.

You’re right Antonio, choosing good host can save you from moving. But, good companies get acquired and turn bad, or your site becomes big and you need host with more resources… You can’t 100% sure you’ll never move.

Excellent idea and execution, Slavi.

Do you save the txt file for future domain moves or does it change every time?

Good question, Nick.

I suggest setting up your MX records so they are ready to go when you switch the DNS. This way the whole thing moves over transparent.

I use Google Mail in Google Apps so this wouldn’t be an issue for me but if you host/do your own email, then do empty (download to your email program) all your email boxes, especially if it is IMAP email.

Thanks for bringing that up, Nick!

Manish, if the transition is done the way Roko describes it here then there is no down time and never any reason for search engines to rank your site differently. It’s only when you experience downtime that search engines might start to reconsider, for that period of downtime and based on that period of downtime, if they shouldn’t rank you differently.

So without all the “no but’s..” the short version is: no, it doesn’t affect your backlinks and no, it doesn’t affect your ranking.