Moved from shared to dedicated IP

...and now no more Googlebot visits

[Alex_T]

I recently (about 2 weeks ago) obtained a dedicated IP from my hosting company.

Now, when I enter one of my keywords in Google, Google finds my page in first place. However, the title and content it provides is that of the hosting company (who uses my former shared IP). I conclude that Googlebot is now spidering them instead of me. In my latest logs I see no more Googlebot visits.

I've read somewhere that this has to do with Google only irregularly updating its DNS cache.

Does anyone know how long it might take until Google clears its DNS cache again? I was hoping that with the big December 2002 update, it would happen. But nothing so far. Is there anything, I can do?

I would be very thankful for some help here!

Alex

Edit: Sorry about the personal webpage info; didn't know.

[edited by: Alex_T at 10:31 pm (utc) on Jan. 2, 2003]

[wruk999]

i would edit your post and remove your domain names & keywords - not allowed in the forums!

i would advise that you wait, as I don't believe there is anything you can do, though there are probably some people around here that may have some suggestions.

Regards

[Mohamed_E]

Google is very bad with DNS updates, this has been discussed many times [google.com] on this board.

If you still have access to the old IP I believe that a RedirectPermanent in a .htaccess file should send Googlebot to the new site. Not sure what you can do if you do not have access to the old IP.

[Alex_T]

Mohamed_E, thanks for the answer. Sorry about the repetitive nature of my post; I followed the search hits closely, but couldn't really come up with a solution to my problem.

Whether I have 'access to my old IP'... well, the problem is that my site is still hosted on the same server. So there is no 'old' server where I could simply put a redirect to a .htaccess file.

I thought about your answer and I am about to contact my hosting company. However, I already contacted them for so many other things (and don't want to abuse their readiness to help) so I wanted to make sure first. - Out of your experience - do you think I better ask for the perm redirect, or should I just wait a little bit longer (now that I have already waited for two weeks)?

[jdMorgan]

Since only your IP address changed, a 301 Permanent redirect to your domain name won't work - in fact, it might represent an infinite loop to Googlebot using cached DNS info.

If possible, you might want to put a redirect in your old account to point to your new IP address, i.e.

RedirectPermanent / /http://12.34.56.78/ 

I've no idea if it would really help, but it probably wouldn't hurt.

Jim

[warmasol]

The same problem for me 3 month ago. Ichaged the host for a domain. All DNS entries changed(the surfers used the new host), google freshbot visited the old host. i duplicated the content for both ip's. There was no problem. Google changed the ip for the domain before the big monthly crawl started. so there is a good chance for a update of the google DNS the next days. that is the best time for google to refresh dns. the deepcrawl with old dns entries is not so good for the quality of the next update.

[Alex_T]

Hmm if I had changed the servers, I could have followed your advise about keeping the old server intact for a while and/or putting a redirect on it to the new server.

But my case is slightly different. I have a virtual hosting plan. Until recently, my site's ip was shared, in fact, it was the main ip of the underlying server.

Now I have a dedicated ip. But the server is still the same. And the server's ip is also still the same. For instance, I can SSH-Telnet to my site still using the old ip.

I think this is been done by my hoster through the "ServerAlias" field in httpd.conf and updating the dns.

[warmasol]

Ok that is an other problem. This was not that i wanted to tell you. The point is, that there is a good chance of a dns update by google the next days. it is not importent for google to update the dns before his monthly index update. this update uses the data from last month spidering. but, if google don't update the dns before the monthly crawl there was problem with the next update.