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.
Changing Server IP Addresses. Should I be concerned?
-
Hello Mozers
Our site has been on a dedicated server for about four years now. (no other sites, just ours on the server)
I have made the decision to move it to a much better and faster server than the current server we are on for more than one reason.
My big fear is Google will lose trust for my site because of the IP change. Ip's stay with the server at 1and1 they do not follow the website.
So, I have done my due diligence and copied over all code and databases and have tested it completely to insure there are no issues when I change the DNS to point to the new server. Made sure 1and1 is giving me an IP that has never been used, I am Keeping the old server on until cached DNS records expire for it.
Is there anything else I need to do to make sure I do not lose current rankings in Google? I have heard nightmare stories about making these kinds of changes but at this point for our site there is no turning back this is a change that must take place.
Any pointers and advice would be much appreciated!
Thanks!
-
Hey Robbie,
Of course you're never entirely sure what Google will do, but if you're only changing host - nothing else - you should have no problem.
Do not:
- Change ownership of the domain;
- Make any major content changes (such as titles);
- Add large chunks of content - keep it to a minimum;
- Make any website template changes;
It's very important that all that's changing is the host. And of course keep an eye on your rankings while doing the migration. Perhaps use a SEOmoz campaign for that. They also do crawl tests so that should be good.
Good luck!
-
If you are only changing to a new hosting provider and you had a dedicated server as well as a dedicated IP. In the content will not be changed there’s not much to worry about at all. Google not lose any trust in you because of an IP address change if you are changing to a white listed IP. the only ways you could actually hurt your site would be if
1St If you moved from a dedicated server to a shared server and had a bad neighbor
"Google recognizes the server’s IP address. If the majority of websites are of ill-repute (porn sites are automatically marked as spammers), then unfortunately this law-abiding client gets lumped in with a bad crowd. Read more: http://online-sales-marketing.com/seo-issues-caused-by-bad-neighbors#ixzz22SZ2T5cA
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution”2nd if you keep both sites up at the same time obviously you get duplicate content. You want to index the new site as soon as possible. Thus inform Google that will allow the Google bot to crawl it and therefore like Google no you are no longer on your old IP.
3rd you could move to a slower host I noticed not talk about right often however slow DNS and slow web hosting both play a role in how Google rank your website. I hope whatever deal you made you are on a host that can provideThe same or better speed at delivering your content. Obviously if you lost a content delivery network or happen to luckily add one those types of things matter to Google. You can check with tools like http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ or http://www.webpagetest.org I tend to use the hosts SEOmoz recommends in their pro perks you cannot go wrong with any of them.
4th make sure your DNS is as good if not better it should be better if you’re moving this will keep speed up and problems to a minimum. Here a list of hosted DNS providers http://dns.nuvvo.com/lesson/12509-list-of-hosted-dns-providers I use ultraDNS and DYN if you are looking to use a provider with any cast DNS and not spend much money at all and still have fantastic speeds Amazon Route 53 is a couple dollars a month on average and has an excellent reputation. http://aws.amazon.com/route53/
I hope I have been of some help in just remember people who don’t have dedicated IP’s rank extremely high regardless of the IP address changing.
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
-
Generally speaking, if you transition it correctly, have the exact same site up and running on the new IP before you change the DNS you should be fine. I did some Googling on the subject, and Mark D. has a much more specific and detailed description of what you should do as far as making sure you have the exact same site running
http://malteseo.com/seo/changing-ip-address-without-losing-google-ranking/
What you do not want to do at this point is change up your URL structure, title tags etc. Those changes alone can impact your rankings and you don't want to compound the issues. Less change, more gradual change is always better.
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
-
What IP Address does Googlebot use to read your site when coming from an external backlink?
Hi All, I'm trying to find more information on what IP address Googlebot would use when arriving to crawl your site from an external backlink. I'm under the impression Googlebot uses international signals to determine the best IP address to use when crawling (US / non-US) and then carries on with that IP when it arrives to your website? E.g. - Googlebot finds www.example.co.uk. Due to the ccTLD, it decides to crawl the site with a UK IP address rather than a US one. As it crawls this UK site, it finds a subdirectory backlink to your website and continues to crawl your website with the aforementioned UK IP address. Is this a correct assumption, or does Googlebot look at altering the IP address as it enters a backlink / new domain? Also, are ccTLDs the main signals to determine the possibility of Google switching to an international IP address to crawl, rather than the standard US one? Am I right in saying that hreflang tags don't apply here at all, as their purpose is to be used in SERPS and helping Google to determine which page to serve to users based on their IP etc. If anyone has any insight this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBassos0 -
Change Google's version of Canonical link
Hi My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it and fix all the technical SEO issues. I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content. While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version. My questions: I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something. Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console? Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDCMarketing0 -
Changing title tags - any potential issues?
Hello all, I am planning to change the title tags throughout a site and am vaguely aware (perhaps wrongly!) that changing title tags across a site is a risk factor - can be a spam flag if changes (to a specific title tag) are implemented too regularly, for example. Would you change title tags across a site in one go, or implement changes gradually - to avoid any risk of upsetting Google. Do you have any insights/tips on the implementation of title tag changes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains! company.com agency1.company.com agency2.company.com... I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google: demo.company.com demo.agency1.company.com demo.agency2.company.com... Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index? We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it? I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all. The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually. Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
The benefits from having a dedicated IP
Is the true? Claim by SiteGround Having a dedicated IP for each website is considered by some experts as an advantage for search engine optimization. There is a common believe that sites with dedicated IP addresses do better in the search engine results than those on shared IPs. Such sites do not share the risk of being banned for sharing the same IP in case another website hosted on the same server gets banned by a search engine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
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:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maddogx
ourdomain.com A 1.1.1.1
ourdomain.com A 2.2.2.2
ourdomain.com A 3.3.3.3
ourdomain.com A 4.4.4.4 Every 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.0