DNS Failover and SEO

[Terabytes]

Hey!

Due to an 8 hour outage yesterday at our web host, the boss inquired about having a 2nd site to switch to in the event this happens again...
(this has only happened once in 5 years...so I'm like... REALLY?)

So, I started looking into DNS failover solutions...(sigh)

Any opinions on the SEO aspects of this type of solution?

Here's how I perceive the problem during a failover:
G or B goes to index a page on regular site A, something catastrophic happens, and now requests are being directed to site B.

Now the SE finds a different IP, and duplicated content. Just sounds like a disaster in the making..

Any opinions on the ramifications of this kind of setup?

thanks in advance!
Tera

[LifeinAsia]

G or B goes to index a page on regular site A, something catastrophic happens, and now requests are being directed to site B.

Why would site B be different from site A? It should be the exact same domain name, only the IP address is different. Users (and G/B) will still be going to example.com, regardless of whether that domain name resolved to IP a.b.c.d or IP w.x.y.z. (Ideally, the content will be the exact same as well, although of course it may be slightly out of date, depending on how often the failover site gets updated.) This is pretty much standard.

[Terabytes]

ok...

I was under the impression that the site IP might have been an issue in this case. G/B knowing the site was moving around, and perhaps receiving some penalty for the redirection actions.

thanks!
Tera

[LifeinAsia]

There have been reports of people's traffic from Google dropping after moving hosts (i.e., permanently changing IPs), but bounced back to normal levels within a few days (or sometimes weeks). But a temporary change during a few hours *shouldn't* cause problems, as this is just standard practice. But who knows what goes on in the minds of Skynet, er- Google/Bing.