Moving your site and Google

How well does google handle you chaning your IPs

[daisho]

Well I've heard it talked about many times before. You have to move your site and are worried how long google will take to find you at your new IP address.

Well I just completed my second move of IP addresses in the past year or so. I switched over at ~2pm Sunday Afternoon and google has already been hitting my new IP hard today (Monday) so it really looks like this is a non issue.

In preperation I reduced the DNS TTL's to 10min for a couple days in advance. I also did not do any type of port or ip forwarding. The old IPs are now dead.

It looks like google is quite quick on refreshing it's DNS cache and it doesn't seem like there is anything to worry about.

daisho.

[msr986]

DNS used to be a bigger issue to GG.

It seems that they update their DNS cache much more frequently now.

When GG had both "deep bot" and "fresh bot" I used to wait until I noticed the deep bot crawls in my new logs before I'd feel comfortable taking down the old site. Now that we only have one brand of bot, it cuts down on the waiting time.

The last time I made a DNS change GG had it within two days.

[Marcia]

I moved a site from one name-based hosting to another and Google never missed a beat on it. Inktomi, on the other hand, has totally messed up with a site that was 301'd over a year ago from a subdirectory.

[dantheman]

My experience was an absolute mess. In April I moved a site from .html to .asp to make use of new scripts, etc. Basically put 301 redirects on all the old html pages pointing to the new asp content. In this most recent update I'm still seeing less than 10% of the asp pages in the index, and their backlinks only show html pages from April! The homepage has a PR of 7 so I don't think that's a problem. My advice is don't change servers, IP's or extensions unless you absolutely have to.

[mcavic]

Thanks for the info, daisho!

In preperation I reduced the DNS TTL's to 10min for a couple days in advance.

An excellent idea, not just for SE's but human visitors too.

[daisho]

dantheman - You are having a different issue entirely. In my case none of the URLs changed. My hosting site changed. In your case your urls changed. Just leave the 301'ds and forget about them. I did a URL switch months ago and 301'd all the old pages and they are still getting crawled. As long as visitors are still getting to your site I figure what does it matter

mcavic - It's really nice if you can be running DNS on the new DNS servers in advance. In my situation I was moving my phisical box so I had my DNS up an running at the destination. Right as I took my box down I changed all the IPs in DNS to the new home. That way on my drive over to my new location the 10min was expiring so by the time I turned me box on everything was already pointing to the new IPs. Everything went smooth and my total downtime was only 25min.

daisho

[killroy]

I've made the experience that google is taking ages to follow 301s. I've recently gone through a re-branding and cahnge of domain. All local relative urls are the same, just the domain changed.

Today, several months later, there is still 20000 pages of the old url in the index and just 10000 pages of the new url.

SN