How long until SE's realise IP changed?

[Frank_Rizzo]

I moved dedicated servers last saturday. DNS was updated to show the change of IP address and web visitors find the new site.

But I'm still getting SE's crawling the old site.

How long are they going to keep doing that for? When should I pull the plug on the old server? Is it best just to delete all the pages and let the SE's work out for themselves what's gone wrong?

What worries me is that I cancel the old server contract and the webhosters sell the server to a new customers. If that happens quickly then the search engines will be crawling what they think is mysite.co.uk but could actually be a totally different themed site.

[encyclo]

The SEs cache DNS for longer than the TTL indiates. Sometimes you get lucky and the bots find the site at the new IP address very rapidly, but sometimes it can take a couple of weeks beofre they realize that there has been a change. You'll need to check your logs and only switch off the old server once the traffic has stopped.