Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Multiple IPs (load balancing) for same domain
-
Hello,
I'm considering moving our main website to a multiple servers, perhaps in multiple different datacenters and use a DNS round robin load balancing by assigning it 4 different IP addresses (probably from 4 different C classes).
example:
ourdomain.com A 1.1.1.1
ourdomain.com A 2.2.2.2
ourdomain.com A 3.3.3.3
ourdomain.com A 4.4.4.4Every time you ping the domain you will get a response from another IP of the group.
Therefore search engines will see a different IP each time they scan the site.
We have used the main IP for our website for past 6 years without changing it. We have a quite good SEO in our niche which I don't want to loose of course.
My question is, will adding more IPs to the domain affect any how on the ranking ? What is the suggested way to do it anyway? What is recommended to do before and after?
Thanks for you attention and help in advance.
Dmitry S.
-
No way. Google may care about DNS repoints, but that's something else entirely.
Google barely cares about shared IPs and 'bad neighborhoods' at this point - so I doubt the IP address matters. Plus, we have several clients using hardware load balancers that do exactly what you describe, and it doesn't hurt them.
-
As far as I know (according to what my colleagues opinions) rank is also linked somehow to the IP address, and from what i've been told, it takes some time until Google learns a new IP address and return the rank to the domain/page.
-
SEO is linked to your domain name, not the IP address. Think of these two scenarios.
1: You move your website hosting company. Your website obviously will get a new IP. Google has stated that this does not affect your SEO.
2: You have your domain hosted on shared hosting. There would then be thousands of sites with the same IP. You clearly don't all share the same SEO values.
-
We work with load balancing a lot using multiple IPs - there are no issues SEO wise however you must be certain that those IPs, in the past, didn't got associated with spam or are on any black lists from previous users as in this case you can get a red flag for bad neighborhood.
In my personal experience this is the only down side - if this is ok - there is no reason for concern - only good things can happen.
Hope it helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is my domain authority still 1?
I changed the domain of my website from www.vanillacrush.co.uk to www.carissamay.co.uk at the end of December and yet my DA for carissamay is still 1. As advised, I set up a 301 redirect from VC to CM which seems to be working fine. However when I check on redirect detective it tells me I also have a 302 set up. Could this be confusing things? http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carissamayhttp://www.vanillacrush.co.uk/
http://www.carissamay.co.uk
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks
0 -
Changing domain for a magento store
Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please... We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results. While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain. My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that? Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too? As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site. Thanks, Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
Primary Domain or Redirect?
We are starting a new travel guide for a resort town. I have bought an expired domain with decent related links and PR (which seems to have survived the transfer (4 months ago). Beofre we launch the new site I am trying to decide if we should use this expired domain as the primary URL for the new site or just do a permanent redirect and buy a new domain that better matches the theme of the site. I am obviously concerned with starting from scatch with a new domain. I am confident we can build some good rellevant links in a short time but this space is very competetive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Locals0 -
Multiple Authors Google + Authorship
Hello, I took a look through past questions but can't seem to find a definitive answer on setting up Google + Authorship credit (for multiple authors) using a Wordpress blog. Has anyone had experience setting this up? Or could you recommend solid reading/research? I took a look at a couple of Wordpress plug in's but just found them very confusing (so did our IT contact who will ultimately be setting up code for this.) Any direction or advice is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
Deferred javascript loading
Hi! This follows on from my last question. I'm trying to improve the page load speed for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. Currently, Google rate the page speed of the GZ site at 91/100 – with the javascript being the only place where points are being deducated. The only problem is, the JS relates to the trustpilot widget, and social links at the bottom of the page – neither of which work when they are deferred. Normally, we would add the defer attribute to the script tags, but by doing so it waits until the page is fully loaded before executing the scripts. As both the js I mentioned (reviews and buttons) use the document.Write command, adding this would write the code off the page and out of placement from where they should be. Anyone have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1 -
How long should a domain redirect take?
Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0