I recently moved my colo'd (dedicated) server from one facility to another one and am seeing a considerable amount of lost links on all my major sites/forums. I was affected earlier this year by the Big Daddy update like many others, but had built my links back up in one of my forums to over 500k (was over a million before big daddy). This was continuing each month until now, where most of my links are being dumped again for all my sites in Google, but not Yahoo, etc. Could this be due to changing my server (and other) IP addresses? How much does Google count IP changes? All the links are exactly the same as indexed.. Just the IP's have changed. Thanks, David
I'm interested too. I moved internationally, and obviously my Uk rankings fell as my new IP address was North American based, but just to MOVE to another server? surely they can't be that capricious?
Sure they could. They're Google... Love them and hate them.. I've moved servers in the same data center in the pasted (leasted dedicated) but this time I moved over 300 miles to completely different IP range.
I assume the IP still resolves to the same country? And have you still got the same scripts in place to redirect http://site.com to www.site.com after the move?
When was your server move? The big daddy update was notorious, but there was also another backlash on June 27th. I can't imagine that the IP Address change had anything to do with it. I mean, I can't see a reason why it would. It could have been coincidental?
IMHO, it was the June 27th backlash that did it. A transfer of IP addresses done correctly should not lose you ground links wise. BTW-My real estate site lost links as well, HOWEVER--how are you measuring links?? (Google link isn't an accurate method in my book.) I agree with the Shark on this one. Best; Eric
Thanks for the info. I'll lookup more on the June 27th issue mentioned. That might actually be what has taken place since I moved the server about 15 days ago. I measure links with the traditional site:domain.com lookup for google. I know this method shows a lot of fluctuations, however only with Big Daddy did I see huge amounts of loss. I also use Google Analytics and a number of other scripts to measure traffic and Google is dropping fast for inbound referrals once again. Thanks, David
I doubt that changing IP would have a significant impact. However the country of hosting can have a big impact - I have been moving sites that were hosted in the US to the UK, because that is where more people search on my keywords, and I am convinced that has helped improve visitor numbers. Many in the UK also search in google with 'pages from the UK' selected - hence ignoring sites hosted outside the UK. I assume this applies to some other countries as well. The DP keyword tool lets you compare the number of searches run for a keyword in different geographical locations.
Are you talking about loss of links or loss of indexed pages? I find it hard to believe your links dropped from a million to 500K.
He means indexed pages. This happened to me too. In four days, I lost google's first page serps for a 1,700,000 pages site and now all pages appear on the fourth page of search. The IP change effect is true.