Multiple IPs (load balancing) for same domain

[maddogx]

Hello,

I'm considering moving our main website to a multiple servers, perhaps in multiple different datacenters and use a DNS round robin load balancing by assigning it 4 different IP addresses (probably from 4 different C classes).

example:
ourdomain.com A  1.1.1.1
ourdomain.com A  2.2.2.2
ourdomain.com A  3.3.3.3
ourdomain.com A  4.4.4.4

Every time you ping the domain you will get a response from another IP of the group.

Therefore search engines will see a different IP each time they scan the site.

We have used the main IP for our website for past 6 years without changing it. We have a quite good SEO in our niche which I don't want to loose of course.

My question is, will adding more IPs to the domain affect any how on the ranking ? What is the suggested way to do it anyway? What is recommended to do before and after?

Thanks for you attention and help in advance.

Dmitry S.

[eyepaq]

We work with load balancing a lot using multiple IPs - there are no issues SEO wise however you must be certain that those IPs, in the past, didn't got associated with spam or are on any black lists from previous users as in this case you can get a red flag for bad neighborhood.

In my personal experience this is the only down side - if this is ok - there is no reason for concern - only good things can happen.

Hope it helps.

[mytouchoftech]

SEO is linked to your domain name, not the IP address.  Think of these two scenarios.

1:  You move your website hosting company.  Your website obviously will get a new IP.  Google has stated that this does not affect your SEO.

2:  You have your domain hosted on shared hosting.  There would then be thousands of sites with the same IP.  You clearly don't all share the same SEO values.

[maddogx]

As far as I know (according to what my colleagues opinions) rank is also linked somehow to the IP address, and from what i've been told, it takes some time until Google learns a new IP address and return the rank to the domain/page.

[wrttnwrd]

No way. Google may care about DNS repoints, but that's something else entirely.

Google barely cares about shared IPs and 'bad neighborhoods' at this point - so I doubt the IP address matters. Plus, we have several clients using hardware load balancers that do exactly what you describe, and it doesn't hurt them.