Ip Change Uk-->Us-->Lost All Rankings

soulvagabond

soulvagabond

New member
Mar 28, 2007
197
0
0
Hi folks,
Any one has an experience with changing the site's geo ip and loosing the rankings in less than 24 hours?!
That's what happened to me. Asked my hoster to migrate my site to an US ip (same hosting, but different datacenter).
So, Ip/Ns update was smooth and there was 0 downtime. Around 15 hours later 0 traffic from G, and all website's keyword ranking nowhere to be found.
The site still ranks #1 for site.com search, but nothing else.

If you had similar experience, post it here please. Particularly, if your rankings ever recovered, how long did it take?
 


Lost UK rankings? or US rankings?

I've never fucked with the geo location shit in GWT but maybe it actually works, assuming you were talking about lost UK rankings. Or maybe it's just re-adjusting the rankings after the IP change? Fuck I don't really follow ranking related shit anymore since I just do PPC nowadays.

I'm pretty high at the moment so this post may not be very helpful lol.
 
Wow - sorry to hear about this. Thank you for posting your findings. Doing a migration like this is something I've never dealt with.

With Google's focus on personalization even for standard users it is no wonder that this happened. This might sound obvious, but have you thought about switching back?
 
Give stuff like this a couple days to sort out. Sounds like maybe the DNS change wasn't as clean as it needs to be.
 
My bad, this project was mostly targeting US customers, and I made a mistake and placed on a Uk ip. It was there for several months, and ranked #1 for the targeted keywords in Uk and #2-3 in Us. I was hesitant for a while to make the shift, but decided to go ahead a couple of days back. The result doesn't look very impressive so far..

shawnhag said:
W.. have you thought about switching back?
Click to expand...

I've already contacted the host asking them if we can make the switchback to the old ip. I will probably wait a week or two, before making this step, hopefully, there will be no need for that.
 
I've experienced this when moving old sites to a CDN.. Give it a few days and it should settle again especially if you have solid backlinks. However if you're targeting US I'd keep it on a US/WW IP.
 
As hard as it is, you need to be able to lose your internet and your traffic for 3 days in this business and not become suicidal, because it does happen.

Your city floods, there is a tornado, Google slaps you, whatever.
 
not a problem, been there many times ;)
What bothers me the most, is how quick the rankings were gone, a little over 12 hours after the ip was changed. Either G is super fast these days, or could be just a coincidence. Another possibility, ip geo chage could trigger a manual review... Who knows. That's my definition of paranoia ;)
 
Exactly the same happened to me.

I got a "60 day penalty". I'm not kidding, I predict in EXACTLY 60 days your randkings will recover.

Seems like a really stupid penalty, but apparently they have it. Sounds like something a mid level manager came up with: "Oh change of IP, lets give them a 60 day penalty hahaha"

You'll have to wait it out, but it won't be forever.
 
Hi dsm56, thanks for your story. Did you work on the site during this 60 days? New content, links etc?!
 
Yep, carried on as usual. Tried some Adwords too, which worked quite well.
 
The same happened to me once. I was targeting the UK mainly, and eventually switched from a UK server to a US one - not realising the impact it would have, and I lost most of my UK rankings. Over the next few days my US rankings improved (which wasn't of much use to me).
I waited for a few weeks and nothing changed, I was impatient, switched to a UK IP again and everything recovered.

You'll probably regain or improve your US positions soon, but I wouldn't expect the UK #1 rankings to return without some help.
 
I had an insurance site for US customers. It was an experiment more than anything else. It was ranking for it own fake brand. Then I moved it to a cheap host, didn't care who, as long as it's not in my neighbourhood of other domains.

No matter what I did, it didn't rank, except for it domain.com. After some digging, I found the web host to be based in Canada. I switched to G .ca and it was ranking for some of the keywords I was targeting there.

So, I learned to host the site in the country I was targeting. HTH
 
Hosting in the target country seems to be a job for Captain Obvious for going forward from here. Google is only going to get harder, never softer, for ranking sites - their business model is to sell sell sell, and if you can't get your site up on p1, you will have to resort to AdWords, right? That seems to be their plan.
 
guerilla said:
Give stuff like this a couple days to sort out. Sounds like maybe the DNS change wasn't as clean as it needs to be.
Click to expand...

that + if somethign works.. why change it. if you rank on UK ip then just leave it for future ;) there is slight chance that when chaning IPs [even not by countries] the IP you land on was previously blacklisted or whatever.
 
I transferred a domain from godaddy to namecheap late last year - I didn't change the whois data/ip/nameservers/etc, just changed registrars, and fell the site off the serps for a little over a week before it recovered. It was attached to my Webmaster Tools account, and I didn't change anything in there either.

Not the same exact issue obviously, but I wonder if G temporarily penalizes changes like these because it flags the domain as having possibly changed owners, and G wants to make sure the site content stays solid before reinstating the previous rankings.
 
I have added the site to the webmaster's panel Today, to see if there's any warnings, looks clean so far.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back