Change Hosts or IPs Without Losing SEO Ranking
Today’s Daily SEO Tip is a step by step guide to keeping a site organic ranking when changing IP address due to moving hosting or in order to obtain a country specific IP address. Today’s tip was contributed by Ran at Conversion Counts. Enjoy 
One of my clients recently had to change their website’s IP address after 6 years [sweating icon]. The client rightfully was concerned what will happen to their organic ranking in the search engines which they spent so many years building up. Below are the steps I took to ensure that their search engine ranking won’t change due to the new IP Address.
Pre work:
1. A copy of the site was installed on the new server and website links were tested including long tail on the test server using a temporary URL
2. We identified when the site is normally visited by the spiders to ensure that the move if possible is actioned afterwards
3. Using web analytics software we identified when the site had the least amount of visitors and conversions (not surprisingly between Friday mid night to Saturday morning)
Moving:
4. A temporary site maintenance message was placed on the old site (to ensure the site isn’t returning a 404 message during the move)
5. DNS entry was updated to point to new IP address
6. It took 30 minutes for the new DNS settings to take effect and the site was accessible via the domain name
Testing:
6. We tested the site’s URL including, sub-domains, sub-folders, long tail etc
7. We tested website 3rd part payment gateways
Result:
8. The website ranking were not effected negatively
9. The website was inaccessible for only 30 minutes
10. Due to obtaining a new IP address which is country specific, the client’s organic ranking has improved considerably in this territory
Don’t go switching hosts without a sound plan, as downtime for only one day can impact your search rankings for weeks.
34 Responses to “Change Hosts or IPs Without Losing SEO Ranking”
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RT @the_gman: Reading: “Change Hosts or IPs Without Losing SEO Ranking | Daily SEO Tip” ( http://tinyurl.com/b32wby )
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Reading: “Change Hosts or IPs Without Losing SEO Ranking | Daily SEO Tip” ( http://tinyurl.com/b32wby )
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By the way, I also have a great write up and slide show of how to properly switch domains, or move content from one domain to the other … I think I’ll be posting this on Thursday as a follow up
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Gerald Weber Reply:
February 26th, 2009 at 3:06 am
I would like to see this post Loren. I just had to do exactly this using a .htaccess 301 redirect and everything seems to have changed smoothly to the new domain without an effecting our search rankings/ However I do still have a couple of lingering questions regarding this topic.
Gerald Weber’s last incredible blog post..Facebook’s BK Sacrifice App and 6 Other Examples of Brilliant Viral Campaigns
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Insight info Loren! I agree that proving 503 maintenance message is very important. In one of our recent client site the same (hosting changed) happened and did not do that even after we advised to do so. SEs indexed the empty page and we were waiting for next 2-3 crawl to get things come into hand!
Mercy Livi’s last incredible blog post..Growing Job Trend in SEO Industry
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Hi Loren,
That’s stunned information about Changing hosts or ip for well ranked site, which i have been across long time back. thanks for sharing..
Dipali Thakkar’s last incredible blog post..How to improve aesthetic appeal of a website
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Hi,
Useful Tip. checking the new IP whether it has been blacklisted is also important while changing the IP. And asking the hosting provider for a fresh IP is also an important factor as few hosts may provide you with a recycled IP address.
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Nice tip, but why would you need to put up a maintenance message? Surely if all the files are left as they are on the old site there won’t be any 404 problems and the eventual changeover will be seamless (in theory!).
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seo bag Reply:
February 25th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I agree with you, Rik. At correct transfer a site to other hosting, it should not be inaccessible any second.
And DNS entry update can last much more than 30 minutes.
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Is there any reason you wouldn’t just want to have the same set of files in both locations until DNS propogates fully to the new server? This way there will be literally zero downtime on the site itself.
Gerald Weber’s last incredible blog post..Facebook’s BK Sacrifice App and 6 Other Examples of Brilliant Viral Campaigns
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web design newport Reply:
February 28th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Might it appear to be duplicate content? For normal users I can see they wouldn’t have a problem but for a distributed database that’s looking at the page from different points where propagation of the DNS is variable then I can see a potential problem. I’ve had DNS changes take 48 hours before (though distant nameservers seemed to update quicker suggesting my ISP was in error somehow).
Don’t know how Goog spiders but imagine if DNS hasn’t got to UK spiders yet, they crawl old IP, US spiders crawl new, DB trigger flags the domain name as “something funky”?
I find this highly unlikely, even more unlikely to be flagged as “funky” unless you’re actually changing domain name, based on prejudice not science.
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Excellent post Loren. Many people don’t think about the potential SEO impact when switching hosting.
I second some of the comments above…
1) No need to put up a maintenance message. Just keep both servers with the exact same set of files during the propagation period.
2) Always ensure you’re getting a good clean IP address from the web host and not a recycled one that could have had a spammy site on it prior to you taking over.
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Thanks for sharing this important info. Cheers.
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I have a client that wants to move to a new server now, and I have been looking for information like this for a while. I was really worried about the moves affect on there ranking. Thanks for the great information on changing host without losing ranking.
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hi,
I found a site to check the IP Address details through ip-details.com. It is easy to find out IP address details, domain info search, internet speed test and ip details on our website, etc., And its free of cost.
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Thanks for the great information. I never thought this was possible but it’s something I will have to refer to in the future if I ever need to do this.
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Thanks.
I have clients who are doing both… changing hosts and IP’s.
I’m putting it off, but at some stage I will have to bite the bullet.
I’ll add this post to my favourites, and I’ll check out “conversion counts”.
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That’s stunned information about Changing hosts or ip for well ranked site, which i have been across long time back. thanks for sharing
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very helpful post for bloggers, because if they have enough money then they will mostly try to change host. thanks for info
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