There’s always been a SEO myth about changing your website IP address. The myth being if you have a website the is bringing in alot of traffic via google and other search engine and then you suddenly switch to a new server with different IP address… will it affect your traffic?
So officially busting the myth … the answer is Yes.
I recently switched over one of my client’s websites from 1 server to the next with a different IP address… same exact website, structure everything exactly the same. Same hosting company too… they just needed a better faster server to keep up with overwhelming traffic.
now the traffic dropped by 80%! Absolutely nothing changed… not even the marketing strategies.
::sigh::
That’s exactly what is supposed to happen. Changing IP address will have no effect on traffic provided you keep the old site up until all the DNS point to the new one.
The drop in traffic Shaydez experienced has to have had some other cause and it was just a coincidence that it happened at the time the IP address was changed.
This is strange, we switched host a couple months ago and IPs are changed also, but we didn’t notice much of traffic drop.
It was a seamless change… i know how to move a website… by switching the NS… we didn’t take down the old server until we made sure the website was working perfectly find on the new server… once that was confirmed we switched it over… no down time not even 1 minute.
I understand that the search engines don’t care about the IP address hence i thought the IP myth was a bust. I’m baffled as to why traffic dropped.
That does sound peculiar. There has to have been something that resulted in the drop but it wouldn’t have been the change in the IP address.
It wasn’t the change of IP address that caused the drop. It would have been the way that you moved the site that was the cause. If you move a site from one IP address to another (keeping iit up on both until the DNS all pick up the change) then the search engines will not care that the IP address has changed. Obviously in your case the site was unavailable for a period during the move and that was what caused the drop since as far as the search engines knew your site had gone and so no longer needed to be listed.
I have moved my sites on a few occasions and have done things properly and the effect on the search engines has been zero.
The suggestion that changing the IP address can affect search engines is a myth with absolutely no truth to it. It is always something else that happened during the move that is the cause.
As long as your new IP address does not end in .0 you should be just fine