Change in IP causing SERP drop?

[mokab]

Last week I changed my IP on the same server, but to a dedicated IP for ssl certificate reasons. Suddenly, my site has completely tanked on google. I checked my dashboard and for some reason, google has 404 errors for pages that clearly exist. I was playing around a little with it and it is also showing 404 for my google verification page, but it I was able to find it in my browser even after clearing my cache. I read some threads of this issue but those were back in 2003 and would think that google would be better at this by now... Any thoughts? The only other change I have made was adding a couple more products and submitting to a couple directories. My site has not been de-indexed... but has actually added a few more pages in the index.

Any help in this would be greatly appreciated. This is not an affiliate site and this drop could really affect my family. Thank you!

[edited by: tedster at 9:52 pm (utc) on May 29, 2008]
[edit reason] no personal urls, thanks [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello mokab, and welcome to the forums.

I checked my dashboard and for some reason, google has 404 errors for pages that clearly exist.

Is this your hosting service's dashboard? If so, that shows that your server is responding with a 404 to googlebot for some reason -- and yes, that will hurt you (to put it mildly.) If this is the situation, I'd get right on to tech support with the information.

Google rarely has any problem with mere IP address changes. But problems can come up if is a technical problem with the way the DNS is set up.

[mokab]

This is from google webmasters dashboard. Support from my host just keep telling me that it's a google issue, not an error on their part...

[tedster]

Do you have access to the server logs so you can look at googlebot's requests?

[WiseWebDude]

A change to a dedicated IP would not bother Google. I've done it and had no problems, BUT I do redirect the IP to the domain name. Are you doing that properly? Are you seeing your site indexed with the IP instead of domain now?

[mokab]

no, not being indexed by IP, that I have found. I wasn't aware that you could redirect an IP, I will try that. Thanks!

[Robert Charlton]

Last week I changed my IP on the same server...

Have you checked your server header responses, not on the Google dashboard, but on a server header checker? Were your DNS changes all made correctly?

I was playing around a little with it and it is also showing 404 for my google verification page, but it I was able to find it in my browser even after clearing my cache.

I have seen odd situations where a page will display in a browser on two different urls and return 404s for both (never have figured out why, but a browser isn't an adequate way to check server responses).