Search engines/ dirs use IP address to locate sites?

?

[grnidone]

I found an email from another forum, and it got me to thinking.

The question was "Is it true that search engines and directories use IP addresses to locate sites? If so, what happens if you were to move a well-positioned site to another ip address? Would it kill your ranking, or what would happen?"

I never thought about something like this before, but I am sure it is a common thing to happen. Does anyone have any experience with this?

-G

[Mike_Mackin]

>Would it kill your ranking

Yes and take months to regain position.

This is common with webmasters who rank a free site then make some money and get a domain.

This just happened to 20 sites of ours when OneMain purchased an ISP and put us on another server.
Had to start all over.
:(

[grnidone]

Is there a way to prevent this? Perhaps use the old domain as a doorway to the new one?

-G

[Rockintom]

<Is there a way to prevent this? >
I think I would take the old ranked pages, make %100 frameset pages out of them with the copy that ranked them so well as the noframes content. You could then load the new page into the frameset so it would be served up when the page was called. This way you wouldn't have to rely on the visitor clicking through to the new site or have to use refreshes or redirects.

[drbill]

I would suggest the old domain to a new one just use the old domain to hold the page that got indexed and link it to the new domain and in time they will both be spidered again.. I would also start submitting the new domain asap..

[Air]

There's really two threads here - if you change domain name then what Mike & Rockintom said. If you change IP address but keep the same domain name then there's no problem.

[Brett_Tabke]

>>Would it kill your ranking
>Yes and take months to regain position.

I hate to disagree with you Mike, but this has not been my experience at all when moving sites from the same domain name to a new ip. In fact, mine is just the opposite. Sites usually go UP in rankings for a brief time after the move. We've moved a couple dozen sites from ip to ip this year (due to hosting changes).

We've seen the rankings temporarily go up after the move on alta, intkomi, and I believe Fast as well. It doesn't appear to have any impact at all on Google - they don't even notice the change.

Another phenom of the move, is that it can trigger Scooter into a full crawl. It is the only thing I know that will. I really believe only Alta and Inktomi are tracking IP numbers with domain names. The others may do so during a crawl, but longer spells between spiderings, I think they do dns on the name every time.

Personally, I've switched IP's on three sites just to get the rankings boost.

As Air said, switching domain names is a whole other thread.

[Mike_Mackin]

>I hate to disagree with you Mike

Understand, but our site just got lost.
Must have been someting else then.

[DaveAtIFG]

Nobody has mentioned DNS (dynamic name server or dynamic name system) in this thread so far and I think that's the key. The DNS system translates your domain name to an IP, you can change the IP at will via Network Solutions or whoever supplies your registration service. As long as the domain name remains the same, changing your IP will have little impact on rankings or traffic. And the engines index by domain name, not IP.

For those who are not aware, an IP (Internet Protocol) address looks like:
123.123.123.123
and a domain name looks like:
my-domain.com

All data packets being shipped around the net from one piece of hardware to another use IPs. At each end, these are usually translated to the more human readable dynamic names by dynamic name server application programs.

My experiences mirror Brett's, the procedure to move a site is pretty straightforward.
1. Copy the site to the new IP
2. Notify your domain name registrar of the new IP
3. 12-48 hours later, your domain name points to the new IP and traffic begins going there
4. After a few days for the stragglers (it takes a while for the new IP to percolate through all the DNS servers and caches), take the old site down

The key is don't change the domain name, and the engines won't know the difference...

[grnidone]

Got some more information about this. I went back to the lady who asked the question in the first place, and there was some more to the post, including a letter back from Google itself.
Here it is:
"
Several people wrote back that they did not experience a
problem when they changed servers and were given a new IP address.
Additionally, they did not resubmit to the search engines. I wrote to Google.com and they were kind enough to write the following....
These folks are very helpful and have a great attitude.

Changing servers should have no impact on your ranking in Google as long as you maintain your back links.

Basically a back link is some page out on the web that contains a link to your page. For example: say your site is www.giggle.com. And out on the web there are three pages that point to your site:

www.laugh.com contains a link to www.giggle.com
www.joke.com contains a link to www.giggle.com
www.funny.com contains a link to www.giggle.com

These three sites are considered your (www.giggle.com's) back links.
We recrawl the web every four weeks and when you move, we'll find
you!

Thanks [Google.com!...]

"

Just thought you all woudl like an update.
-G

[Trafficnapper]

Hello Dr Bill and all the rest of you.
My first post here I like these forums one of the best I have seen.

From my experience with the engines some of my
ips seem to do much better then others will.
This is also due to the fact that if the ip was
used for spamming maybe before you switched to it,
maybe the ip is burned out. I talked to you about this the other day Dr. Bill. Also nobody
has mentioned whether or not they think the engines may be looking for virtual domain name hosting vs. ip based hosting when they spider your sites. If the spiders can detect virtual domain hosting, this may explain a strange behavior in the search engines also. Seeing that arin.net is going to at some time or other make us all use virtual domain name hosting in the future. I would bet that the engines will come to rely on more name based recognitions on submissions and less on ips altogether.
Plus I am sure there is also a very high cap
on how many submissions can be made from a single ip in one day also since more and more isps have
went to name based hosting, in fact most people
would not even realize they are on it. To test
go to your assigned ip address if its your site then your more then likely on ip based, if its not your site, your on a virtual hosted server. And it may be a reason that you have a hard time getting listed in a good position, unless once again as I mentioned before the engines can detect a virtual host ip and realize there are a bunch of sites there.

[Brett_Tabke]

Hi Traffic, and welcome to the forums. An interesting post.

Grnidone actually asked this question at a recent se get together and the answer was "yes", some SE's do track by ip address and not domain name. This is highly unfair to those on virtual hosted sites. You get thrown in with everyone else on the host too. For all you know, the guy on the same IP address could be running warez out the back door.

[Trafficnapper]

Brett

You are very right, seems they would be more logical then this. Also I would say that the systems they use were implemented before they realized that ip's would become short in supply someday. In this same respect say I was spamming off of one set of name servers and then you got a site set up on my same ip block with the same name servers, well the way some of the se networking works
they may see a pattern in this and reject your submission. Now that may or may not be a reality, since the engines are adjusting so much at all times I would guess it true in some isolated circumstances.

[csandiford]

Thought I'd re-awaken this one. We moving to a new server, this is set up for http 1.1, in other words we can have multiple domains on a single IP. Recommendations please, go with this option or stick to unique IP's for each domain?
Chris