Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
However, it appears to have stopped with the crawls on the new one as well. It only visits the index page when we update and some older urls occasionally, nowhere near the scale we were seeing before the move. The cache has not been updated since the day before the move and none of the new pages are being indexed whereas they would have been included within minutes of being posted before (with the XX minutes ago thing next to them). Old urls seem to have preserved their rankings.
The move was a straight control panel move, all urls / rewrites / structures and pages are mirrored to the last bit. The site is completely clean, we don't play around.
I didn't expect this (even though I feared it might happen).
Anyone have any ideas / experiences?
Here are some other factors you can check after a move:
1. Is the new server configured to respond to if-modified-since requests?
2. Is the new server using gzip compression?
3. Are there any DNS configuration problems?
4. I assume this is a new IP address - is it shared with any other domain?
Also, for anyone reading this thread who is planning a hosting move, there's a link in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. It goes to a nice blog post from Matt Cutts on the topic "Moving to a New Web Host".
Old urls seem to have preserved their rankings.
Thank you for the reply. We are talking a short time period here, it may have just end up being googlebot waiting for all it's machines to sync. Your assumption is correct, yes.
As for the factors you have pointed to, #1 is interesting, I will have to look into that. The rest are definitely not the issue here.
Thanks again!
Google is still showing the cache from the last day before the move and when searching for the site domain the "see more results from blahblah" link is gone. Also when searching for site name, a page from the site shows at #1 instead of the site index which was not the case before.
New nameservers and server are working properly, resolving from all over the world.
I'm on the verge of a breakdown as a really huge amount of time and quality work was devoted to the site by our whole team from producing quality content to making the site absolutely clean and user firendly.
If we did any nonos I would understand the whole thing, however since that's not the case I'm simply utterly confused and completely desperate.
Does the domain name resolve directly, with no redirects involved at all? And is the new IP address dedicated and not shared?
Also, is your error handling on the new server completely correct? For example, does the server return a true 404 status in the http header and not just a custom error page with some other http status?
What do you mean by directly? It's a pure DNS entry if that is what you asked, no 301,302,meta or similar redirects. Dedicted ip, as it was before, fresh one as well, hasn't been used before unless our host wasn't honest with us which I simply don't believe as they are more professional and dedicted to what they do than anyone I have dealt with before.
Well, error handling.. we use some rewrite rules so there are no true 404 errors being generated, but that was the case before the move as well.
Thanks
Anyone else have any ideas as to what could be happening here?
Anyone else have any ideas as to what could be happening here?
Before we make any more guesses, let's confirm that everything is in order with your DNS. Again, many of these types of issues can be tracked back to something in the DNS so that would be my "first" suggested move. From the findings in that report we can then make more refined "educated guesses" as to what may be the challenge.
I would also like to point out that since we don't have a "before and after" snapshot of a DNS Report, it may be difficult to pinpoint any one particular issue. I'd be looking at the information for your Parent Nameservers, the NS Records and your SOA particularly this one "SOA MINIMUM TTL value".
I know sounds trivial but just my thought as to a possible reason for this type of odd bot behavior.
I have moved many sites to different servers and never have done a password protect I all I ever did was change the dns leave both sites up till the bot activity as stopped and traffic has been rerouted through the dns and then take the other server down. Just a by the book move as he has done as well.
I have whenever at all possible kept the same ip address so really there is no dns just a short period of down time.
Never had an issue but I havent moved a site in about 2 years so there could be more to this and a by the book move is not by the book anymore.
I will leave the site on my server for a couple days till I don't see any activity and then shut the IIS down.
justasite
do you have an update as to the cause or still looking?
Ok GB is crawling at what seems to be pre-move frequency, cache has been updated to a post move date, but... None of our new posts are being indexed, while everything up to the move would be in the results within minutes of it being posted.. G blog search is picking it up, but G itself isn't which is scary. We weren't updating during the move because we wanted to let G find the new server and begin cralwing it before we do. Old pages are doing as well as they ever did, but nothing new is being included and that is making me very concerned :(
bwnwbn, nope no ideas yet unfortunately..
Our move was flawless no issues nothing.
OLD Server IP - AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD
New Server IP - AAA.BBB.#*$!.ZZZ
** Our Database was moved to new server around 6 months back
Present Status:
We have webfiles on both old server and new server (.htacess pointing only to domain name)
But I can find googlebot vanished, any suggestion/precautions we should do immedaitely to not suffer ?
We can find almost 50% traffic drop in last 5 hours when we also changed IP address of our custom nameservers used for this domain.
