Why doesn't google see it?

same nameservers, moved from shared IP to static IP, google does not see it

[przero2]

I moved my domain from shared IP to static IP following the comments here that a static IP is a good thing!. Same nameservers, host and phyisical location of the files. The only change has been IP address from shared to a different static IP. And google does not see it for 2 months!. Last month I had my Cobalt RAQ page as the main page for the index (surprisingly it still ranks great for some of my keywords - perhaps based on linktext on exernal links!). This month, I do not see the bot in logs yet!!. Obviously concerned that the bot is perhaps accessing the server default page and running away from there!!!.

It makes me wonder that moving from shared to static IP is the biggest mistake I ever made!. Appreciate any comments on how I may be able to inform Google of this issue

[ciml]

IP changes can be problematic because search engines cache for longer than browsers. See the Moved host [webmasterworld.com] thread and the recent DNS Changes in Europe [webmasterworld.com] thread where GoogleGuy commented that they're "refreshing [their] DNS pretty often these days".

[chris_f]

Can someone give me a summary please. I have read the threads and am getting a little confused. What is the issue with Google and changing a sites IP Address? Also, Is this just Google or do other search engines have this problem as well?

Chris

[ciml]

Sure, Chris. A browser or ISP proxy accesses some domains often, and a lot of domains never. A search engine robot has to visit a huge proportion of domains during each crawl so DNS caching is much more important. I think that's why we see a problem.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. 4.3, Crawling the Web:

A major performance stress is DNS lookup. Each crawler maintains a its own DNS cache so it does not need to do a DNS lookup before crawling each document.

I would assume that there's a large Google DNS cache as well, that the individual crawlers connect to.

This has been a significant problem for many sites, but GoogleGuy's indicated that they're doing more DNS checks now so the problem is reduced.

[Marcia]

Quite a while ago I was told that Google crawls by IP and domain name both, though I really don't know details. As a safeguard, when I've moved sites from one static IP to another I made sure to have one of the links pointing to the moved site on a page I knew would be crawled changed from a link to the site by domain name to a link to the new IP number instead.

I started to do that after an IP number I'd left was assigned to another site and that other site showed up by mistake instead of what should have been my Google listing.

This doesn't work with name based hosting naturally, which I moved several sites to at the end of February. But I had no problem with Google even with that. Not so with Inktomi, who are not near as good about changes. I still prefer to have a unique IP number, by far, but some hosting deals are just too good to pass up.

przero2, in your place I'd get a link using the IP number - one link will do.

[przero2]

Marcia, Thanks for the input ... I will get a link to IP address now.