Can an IP change put a site in the sandbox?

[mrMister]

I have a small site that used to rank number one for the main search term. It's nothing special, so I don't check on it regularly, however when I looked in february, the site was no longer anywhere in the top 5 pages of the SERPS.

Nothing has changed on the site at all. It's been exactly the same for about a year (and pretty much identical to the day it was launched in 2003)

Al that has changed is that I switched bandwidth providers and therefore the IP address changed (although the domain is still the same)

Is an IP change enough to tip a web site in to the sandbox?

If so if I leave the site, will it return, or should I try and find out what's wrong and fix it?

[mufad2]

I am in the same boat, switched servers and got sandboxed in early feb.
Dont know what else to do except wait ...
Mufad.

[mrMister]

How much downtime did you have mufad?

I'm wondering if the small amount of downtime that I had was enough to warrant backlinks being removed from other sites.

[kevinpate]

> Is an IP change enough to tip a web site
> in to the sandbox?

It wasn't an issue last summer when I moved a site
from one host company to another. Of course, that was then and this is now, so I dunno.

[Alternative Future]

I would be interested in hearing more on this if anything is available, as I am about to switch hosts therefore have a new IP.

Anyone...?

-George

[trillianjedi]

Only someone who's done this recently would be able to confirm/deny that, but I would say it's extremely unlikely as long as the domain remains the same...

TJ

[mrMister]

Sorry guys, I feel a right idiot. I was wrong about the IP being the only thing I changed.

I'm not sure how I forgot this, but I moved the site from a subdirectory to a subdomain, which of course would be enough to cause my site to freefall in the rankings!

With the latest Google Directory update that has just happened, the links on DMOZ got updated on the Google servers which was probably enough to push the site back up to its old position.

I doubt the IP change made a difference.

[No5needinput]

I moved my wifes hobby site (with good rankings for some money terms) yesterday. The dns had switched this morning and the site is up and running on its new host. Changed nothing on the site at all.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

[encyclo]

If you leave the site available on the old IP address for a while after the change then you should be OK. Googlebot caches the DNS for longer than usual, which means that even after you have successfully made the switch for your users, Googlebot may still be looking for your site on the old IP address. Plan for a two-week overlap as a minimum to be safe.

Once all traffic has stopped on the old hosting and your stats indicate that Googlebot is hitting the new IP address, then you are safe to switch off the old hosting. In case anyone's wondering, there is no problem with duplicate content because the domain name is the same, so Googlebot (and other spiders) only see it as one site.

[WebFusion]

I highly doubt changing your host/i.p address would trigger the "sandbox". We've changed our dedicated server/I.P. several times without ill effect.

Two things I did notice that negatively affected our competitors with this update are:

1. Non-focused reciprocal linking (i.e. those competiors of ours who linked to any and every site that asked, regardless if it matched their subject matter).

2. Prolific "paid links" from non-related sites (i.e. a couple of our competiors who were buying PR from completely unrelated sites went MIA....one also went from a PR7 to a PR5, which was probably a result of PR no longer being passed from a site he purchased link(s) from).

[mufad2]

After making the dns change I had made sure to keep the old host up and running. GoogleBot started crawling the new site the same day that the dns change was made. And some of the google crawlers kept hitting the old server for several weeks after the change.
I am not sure if its the ip change or something else that triggered the MIA.
I had purchased a sitewide link from a related site with thousands of indexed pages, my site was #1 for a keyphrase having thousands of searches every day, and the site that I purchased links on was among the top 10, I have renewed the links as I am atleast getting a little traffic from that site, with the new update, the site on which I purchased links has raised in the rankings.
My site is MIA for its own domain search, the domain is not a keyword, its a brand name domain, and sites linking to my site are showing for a search for my domain without the dot com!
Previous to the update, my site would show fresh tags almost every day, now a search for cache:sitename.com shows a date 10 days ago, but the site is being crawled everyday by googlebot.
I am still not sure what is the cause for the missing in action phenomena, any advice would be welcome,
Mufad.

[kwngian]

I had purchased a sitewide link from a related site with thousands of indexed pages, my site was #1 for a keyphrase having thousands of searches every day, and the site that I purchased links on was among the top 10, I have renewed the links as I am atleast getting a little traffic from that site, with the new update, the site on which I purchased links has raised in the rankings.

Wow, sounds like a method to get a competitor's ranking down while bringing your's up - sell sitewide link to lower PR sites.

[walkman]

many of us have got the same treatment. I have a realy old site and haven't changed servers or IP in 2-3 years.

[aris1970]

Hello,

We moved one of our sites (PR6 high with 25000+ pages of rich content) to another server with different IP just 7 days ago and it seems that nothing bad has happened so far. The site is ranked on top10 for a very competitive keyword (20+ million results) and today it just gained 2 more positions. The site is still available on the old dedicated IP also and we will be waiting for another 7-10 days before we switch off that server.

Just my 2 cents of recent experience.

[lego_maniac]

I don't think IP address has much (if any) effect on sandboxing. We use a DNS-based load balancer. Depending on what our engineers are breaking on our network that week, we sometimes point our website to different machines on different subnets. This hasn't had any ill-effects on our position.

[phpdude]

Changing IP number will not matter. In the last several months I've changed numerous sites to another host with not so much as a blip on the screen, Once I saw the bots stop coming to the old host, I cancelled them.