IP problem

used old ip address, from old customer for new site

[EAHunt]

We reuse ip address when a customer either leaves us or shuts down, or for a variety of reasons. We usually use it when we are in the process of creating and testing the new site. The problem I had was that the old ip, I guess had some ranking and google very quickly picked up the pre-production site and the customer was experiencing traffic and got a good amount of sales.

Now, we put the new site on a different ip and moved the dns over (from their old site that they brought with them). Now they have dropped out of sight (site!) and the only thing that is ranking is the old Ip dns'd to the old company that shut down.

Have we done something wrong?

Client seems to think so.

[DaveAtIFG]

Have we done something wrong?

No, but you'll never convince your client! :) In any event, the unhappy client was getting traffic intended for another site and would have lost it when Google finally detected their site, whether you moved it or not.

I think the best you can do is to prevent a reoccurrence. A robots.txt file added at that test IP should be sufficient, it won't block every crawler but all of the major SEs will respect it.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The first line says "block everybody," the second says "from everything."

If you need it, here's more about robots.txt [searchengineworld.com].

[Marcia]

I had a similar situation, where I put up a new site with a host that was a reseller for a big outfit, where IP numbers were dynamically assigned among a number of resellers and automatically reassigned when one was "vacated".

It was for kitchen gifts and appeared all over very nicely, except that the URL the visitors were being sent to was to the previous occupant of the IP. It was my site, but another URL they still had for the IP. So some real estate outfit in Florida was getting people looking for soup and cookie mixes in a jar. ;)

MSN and Google really loved that site for some reason, it was confusing and hard to understand and explain what was going on. Also a little embarrassing. We did a paid Ink page at Position Tech and it cleared up almost right away, and for Google I put up a link to the new site pointing at their correct IP number, so that straightened out.

If you've got a page that gets Fresh crawled (like a portfolio page), try putting a link on to that site with the IP, it might just get picked up quickly, and it's not that long 'til the next regular Google update happens. We did that with a member's site that had changed hosts mid-month and been messed up, and it straightened out right away.