Forum Moderators: open
Some people have suggested that placing a 301 (permanent) redirect in the old site's htaccess file will alert Google to the change quicker than doing nothing.
My old hosting service left a lot to be desired (which is why I moved) and I find that while a plain "redirect" command will work, a "redirect permanent" or "redirect 301" will not. I guess this means that my old hosting service had an old version of Apache.
Given that a plain "redirect" return a 302 (temporary) code, would I be better off using it, or not using it (and given that my only reason for putting it there is to help Google)?
If I do nothing will it still take about a month for Google to find the new IP address? (Inktomi updated its IP address after three days!)?
If you are talking about a different domain than that's a seperate issue...
If google thinks that your ip is 1.1.1.1 for the domain www.mydomain.com - it will send a request to 1.1.1.1.1 host:www.mydomain.com.
It will receive a resopnse to check www.mydomain.com (which google still thinks is on 1.1.1.1) and will try again requesting from the same old box... and will get the same redirect.
What you might try to do is to change your nameservers. I've had good luck with that. Once the authoritative ns is changed - google seems to recache the ip again.
The forums say that Google does not quickly respond to server ip address changes. They also suggest that a "redirect permanent" can help.
You will confuse googlebot.
301s are for changing urls and domains - NOT IPS.
Best thing to do is keep the old files on the old host until googlebot figures out the new ip. Depending on your money and hosting situation - leave it up for a month or so.
Best thing to do is keep the old files on the old host until googlebot figures out the new ip. Depending on your money and hosting situation - leave it up for a month or so.
Chris_R,
This did not happen recently, several years ago in fact ... but I had a problem switching my IP and by mistake, the old IP kept my site up for a month longer than they were supposed to and of course, the new IP had it up and running also.
The result was that my site got dumped entirely off every major search engine and I had one heck of a time getting back in.
Now things may have changed since then ... but I would like to know from others if this is still a practice which can cause trouble for the site owner or not? I am planning to change IP's soon and don't want to run into the same thing again if I do it this way.
You would think that Google would realize that people do switch ip's and as long as the URL is available would pick up un this rather quickly?
In my case - it doesn't hurt me to leave the old site up - as I have several servers and I usually only pay for bandwidth.
301s are a bad idea - as basically google would see this:
example.com - used to be 1.2.3.4 now 1.2.3.5
google goes to example.com at 1.2.3.5 - everything ok
google goes to example.com at 1.2.3.4:
1) You could have a 301 to example.com, but that would just send google back to 1.2.3.4, and then back to 1.2.3.4, and so on....
2) You could have a 301 to 1.2.3.5, but that would have google index by the IP - and no one wants to see an IP in the SERPs. If you needed to switch hosts again you would ABSOULTELY have a problem that would need 301s or something to fix - unless you want to hope google can figure everything out on its own.
The problem is apparently google caches the ips in order to save time. With millions of domains - this saves time crawling.
Lets say Google does this every week (just a guess).
Monday: Google has a cache list of all the domains it wants to index.
Tuesday: Your site is still hosted on superduperwebhost at ip 1.2.3.4.
Wednesday: You decide you hate this host and switch to bobswebhosting. You change your dns at directnic or wherever to point to that host.
Friday: Your site is up and running and everyone on the web get to your site at your new ip of 1.2.3.5.
Saturday: You tell superwebhost to go jump in a lake and stop charinging you - they delete all files from 1.2.3.4
Sunday: Googlebot decides to visit your site - they know from their list it should be at 1.2.3.4. They do there and get a 404 or some other type of error as you site is now on 1.2.3.5.
A month later you are dropped from the index as they didn't find you.
In reality google may try more than once, but they may not before the cache is updated - or they stop crawling for that cycle.
Google is still going to old IP.
Do they update the cach at least a couple of times a month? Now I'm nervous :)
I would wager to say this only effects 5% or less of people changing domains, but this is only a guess.
I have no way of knowing - and I don't think google has ever said how often they update this. Even if it was every few days you could still be out.
I really wouldn't worry too much. Google wants sites and they do their best to find them. The time they save by doing the cache probably allows them to visit more domains than they'd lose if they didn't cache.
Not much comfort if your the one that gets the ax.
I doubt this would have any permanent effect.
Don't worry too much...
[edit - added:] And based on what hurlimann said - I would say it is probably less than once a week. Of course this could vary.
BTW, frshbot hit one of my sites the day after I changed ips this week.
After a few days with both sites up, see if you can switch to the cheapest hosting option at your old site since googlebot will be the only one going there.
There will not be a duplicate content penalty since there is no duplicate content in the namespace. Even though the users and google are going to different servers, they are seeing the same content for the same URLs.
Back in the Backrub days, each Googlebot machine had a local DNS cache to improve efficiency. A central DNS cache was rumoured to be added to Google some time later. If the local DNS caches still exist, then you may still continue to get hit by Googlebot on the old IP after the time when it first starts hitting the new IP.
I echo what Chris and others have written. 301 redirection to the same URL would just cause a loop if Googlebot bothered to follow it.
If you absolutely can't keep the content up at the old IP but can 301 redirect, then redirecting to a different domain (or straight IP address) is probably the only reasonable solution, but if the URLs you're redirecting to have identical content to the 'main' URLs at the new IP address then they'll probably be merged if Googlebot does find the new IP, so you might only get the interim URLs listed.
Keeping the content available at the old IP address for a while is the only good option, IMO. I think it would be nice if Google could give some kind of guidance about their DNS update frequency (root server checks and NS checks); it's still a FAQ [google.com] even though far fewer people report problems these days.
I changed IP addresses last week and Googlebot picked it up in 3 days and is now crawling the new ip.
mfishy
Maybe if we got enough people to switch their IPs around we could find Google's DNS refresh times to a reasonable degree of accuracy.
I am getting picked up by the freshbot. I believe the deepcrawl was already over
Just checked stats and see 628 page requests by:
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Does this mean I'm in the clear or do I still need to sweat it out?
On 10th February we moved to our new server and some time during that day our domain started resolving to the new IP.
We had left it until we could see on the old IP that Deepbot had stopped coming, only Freshbot was a regular visitor.
I placed a link to the new IP as the very first link on the page of the old site (great tip from a post on this site), and as of Feb 14th at 4.40 am, Freshbot had started visiting the new IP. We have even had three visits from Deepbot.
Interestingly enough, all googlebots stopped visiting the old IP on Feb 14th at 1.25 am. Does this mean we are in the clear? Not sure, will keep monitoring the stats and hoping ;-)
Officially we have until the 23rd before having to give up our old server (the option to keep it open a month could be expensive).
We have never even bothered to consider the IP change and google before - as someone has already said here "ignorance is bliss" :-)
