Hey, it’s good to be back! Time to kick it into gear. For today, I have an interesting SEO-related question: how important is an ip address change to your SEO fortunes?
To expand on the question: if a site needs to be relocated to a different physical machine – whether with the same hosting company or a new provider – it is often necessary to change the numerical internet address associated with that website. Will Google look down on such a change?
As with most questions SEO, there is no absolute answer. Given the evidence we see with migrating many sites from other providers and between our own servers, we have yet to seen any penalty or search ranking change due to an IP address shift.
But, given the fact that many of our customers live or die by their search placement, we like to err on the side of caution. Every change we make on a website needs to be given due consideration.
Let us know if you have seen downward slides after an IP switch. Moving your site into a “bad neighborhood” could be problematic. But, beyond that, is an ip change penalty a real issue or an urban legend? Let us know your thoughts?
