Hi everyone, one of my hobby sites grew beyond expectations and now i need to upgrade the plan. The site in question is on a shared server and will be so on the new plan, however with much more bandwidth available... The move includes changing server and i will get a new IP... This field is not my strong point, thats why i need some input here; the domain stays the same, content stays the same, just new server and new IP adress, any known problems with the search engines with that? (domain is registered with the hoster) cheers and thanks for your input... regards viggen
In my experience there should be no reason to worry as long as the domain name remains the same. I have in the past changed hosts several times and each time my PR remained the same.
I'll be looking for replies on this subject with interest as I found out that my provider changed my IP without my knowledge some time back. A few months ago I all but dissapeared from the rankings in all the search engines and now alexa thinks its a new site sand shows no historical data. My Google PR went from 3 to 2 and it lingers at 150 for 1 of my key terms and not in the first 1000 for another. Previously I consistently ranked 5 or better for both. At this stage I have not identified any other reason other than the changed IP I only found out about 2 days ago. Can a changed IP have produced these effects?
Several months ago, I changed the server on one of my sites. I noticed that 90 days later, I was still getting MSNBot hits at the old IP address. I honestly don't know if I would have been better off shutting down apache at the old address or if I did the right thing by keeping the sites in sync until SE bot log activity stopped.
Maybe other factors are to be considered.. Are there a significant number of links pointing to your site which use the ip address in/as the url? This would definately affect the situation..