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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?

So yesterday google webmaster tools has over 5,000 links linking to my site.  I get in this morniing and now i have 16 links linking to my site and no rankings minus brand terms.  I do not believe that I have been penalized but I might have been. After digging further into this it seems that my www.domain.com and domain.com are separated and webmaster tools is tracking www.domain.com and majority of links are to domain.com.  Is this possible or am I wishing to see something that is not there. Any help and recommendations would be absolutely appreciated.

Hello All, I have been given the opportunity to go to several conferences.  But like most SEO guys, I have a tone of work, and need to use my time sparingly.  The one conference that has peaked my interest is SMX. I was wondering if anyone has been to SMX before and if they recommend it. Also if anyone has any other conferences they would recommend, preferrably on the east coast, that would be interesting please let me know. Any answers are appreciated.  Thank you.

I have a client of which we put up an extensive responsive landing page with a blog in the backend, this was done with Worpress. Over the new years, our web developer pushed the new site live without telling me, and left the privacy settings on (meaning: please ask search engines not to index this site). The robots.txt I had set up was set up so that the site would be crawled weekly.  The site had privacy settings on for 9 days (more than a week, ugh!). Thereby, taking away all the SEO work I had done prior and basically starting with a brand new slate. My question: Do I need to start over with all the seo, or do I need to continue pushing forward and waiting for them to come back up?  Either way, still need to do work, but I want to really know if my prior work has become moot.  Thanks for your replies.