Switching the IP?
-
I am currently in the process of migrating a site, the domain will stay the same, it will go from example.com to example.com. The only thing that is changing is the IP address and the host. The server's will still be in America.
I have done research on this question and have gotten varied answers, some saying that the ip change will affect the SEO rankings depending on where country is, and some saying that Google only looks at the URL not the ip address in terms of rankings. Does anyone have an answer so I can be prepared and mitigate as much damage as possible?
-
Thanks for that. What you are experiencing by the way could be because the server does not have a reverse dns entry. A lot of servers do not come with those and that could also be affecting your ability to send out email. Also be sure that your spf records are setup correctly so that they are viewed as credible. I had a similar issue a while ago, and it had very little to do with my ip and very much to do with a lack of a reverse dns. Also, you should run a blacklist check on the mail ip to ensure that it is not listed on 1 of the 150 spam lists. I use mxtoolbox to check that. Hope that helps.
-
Jason,
We have had experience with this, and here is what we found. First it did NOT hurt our SEO scores from any of the measuring company's or metrics.
Where we did see an improvement is our website performance. We are now on a stand alone server, so our performance has greatly improved, and we are able to present a page much faster. In addition, server crashing has greatly improved. Where we have seen a hit is our ability to automatically send an e-mail "order shipped" response. Our e-mail message is getting refused by certain e-mail hosts, specifically ATT based address. Somehow the server space provider has a block of IP address that have been marked as not so desirable. We never send out spam, but it seems that someone close to our IP address block does, so the entire IP block is rejected by ATT.
So to answer your question the IP address has not caused a SEO reset or degrade of our Authority or rank, however you should be cautious about what your neighbors are doing with respect to sending out e-mails. Perhaps you could get a list of IP address that your hosting provider uses, then check those address with respect to spammers, before you commit to a hosting provider.
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
-
Negative SEO impact of two Similar Domains on Same IP
Our ecommerce company has acquired a former competitor which has similar content & largely sells the same set of products. Both domains run on the same ecommerce platform version and do well organically on an overlapping set of keywords. Currently the websites are separate instances which are hosted separately. There is no interlinking or cross branding between the sites. Since each brand has strong equity & SEO, there are no plans to combine brands or domains. For several reasons, it would be ideal to combine platform instances and hosting, but we are concerned about potential SEO impact of shared IP addresses. Is it likely that moving the sites to the same IP/C-Block could have a negative SEO impact since they rank on the same keywords. Would Google devalue one site if they were seen to be connected or owned by the same company? I know this issue has been addressed for domains with more variance between products and content, but since there is a large overlap (but not duplicate content) between our two domains, we wanted additional insight. Obviously there are other SEO factors when you move a site, but we are currently trying to understand this specific factor. Thanks Community for your help! -Amber
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmberHanson0 -
Website Not Performing after switch to HTTPS
We recently switched our client's website to HTTPS but after the move, we've experienced a huge decrease in rankings (off the map), and traffic. Our metas for the homepage are not being picked up by Google, although it was appearing correctly before the switch. We've implemented all redirects, resubmitted URL to Google, and updated GSC. GSC is also reporting errors in our XML stating there are no URLs to crawl. Has anyone had any issues similar? What do you all recommend? Help greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMRTCHInteractive0 -
IP Address location v Server Location Penguin 4/Possum
Hi All, Our hosting provider have their IP address range in Melbourne but offers servers in Sydney or Melbourne.. If we were to take a server in Sydney and an IP address from their Melbourne range (only IP range offered) will the new localisation updates to the Penguin/Possum Algorithms serve less up to our clients in Sydney thinking we are located in Melbourne? Sorry if im confusing.. I know I am 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
Traffic has not recovered from https switch a year ago.
I have an ecommerce site that was switched to https a year ago almost to the day. Our category pages are about half of what they were. The redirects were put in properly, and everything in webmaster tools looks good. Anything out there I may not have thought of? Want to add that the drop is only in Google, Bing stayed just fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Why would my ip address show up in my webmaster tools links?
I am showing thousands of links from my servers ip address. What would cause that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Should I Re-Direct Based Upon IP
I am working on an e-commerce store. There are 4 subdomains for 4 seperate languages. ie uk.business.com, fr.business.com etc The client is asking that any French speaker (French IP address) is only shown the FR subdomain and so on for all languages. Is this the best way of doing things, or am I better off without the re-direct.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
301 redirect for ip address in SERPs
Hi, I've recently had the misfortune of my site's ip address being crawled and indexed by Google, which is causing some duplicate content issues. Due to the nature of the site we're not able to implement a canonical tag to fix this at present. Would a 301 redirect do the trick, and if so, could someone point me to what I'd need to add to our .htaccess file? Many thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHillfd0 -
International IP redirection - help please!
Hi, We have a new client who has built a brand in the UK on a xyz.com domain. The "xyz.com" is now a brand and features on all marketing. Lots of SEO work has taken place and the UK site has good rankings and traffic. They have now expanded to the US and with offline marketing leading the way, xyz.com is the brand being pushed in the US. So with the launch of the offline marketing US IP's are now redirected to a US version of the site (subfolder) with relevant pricing and messaging. This is great for users, but with Googlebot being on a US IP it is also being redirected and the UK pages have now dropped out of the index. The solution we need would ideally have both UK and US users searching for xyz.com, but would see them land on respective static pages with correct prices. Ideally no link authority would be moved via redirection of users. We have considered the following solutions Move UK site to subfolder /uk and redirect UK ips to this subfolder (and so not googlebot) downside of this is it will massively impact the UK rankings which are the core driver of the business - also would this be deemed as illegal cloaking? natural links will always be to the xyz.com page and so longer term the US homepage will gain authority and UK homepage will be more reliant on artificial linkbuilding. Use a overlay that detects IP address and requests users to select relevant country (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Use a homepage with country selection (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Is there an easy solution to this problem that we're overlooking? Is there another way of legal cloaking we could use here? Many thanks in advance for any help here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0