How a change in IP address affects SEO?

[Layer7Tech]

Our domain is pretty mature, has several quality backlinks - ranks well for our key terms - but we need to change our IP address because we use a cloud provider and it's a shared IP that has had a security breach.

How will this affect rankings? www.layer7.com

[Chris.Menke]

Changing your IP address shouldn't really do anything to your search results as long as your're staying with the same host and you're not moving onto an IP address that's plagued with spam sites.

Here are a couple of otherthreads dealing with that:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-will-changing-ip-addresses-impact-seo

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google_webmaster_help-indexing/P5z_Oc-XUiI

[Adam_Cochran]

There certainly should be much of an impact in your ranking. However there are a couple things worth considering in this matter:

-Location value: If you are a working on a campaign that is focused on a specific international region then having an IP from that country can be beneficial in the eyes of some search engines in regards to local searches

-Link Value: You'll also want to make sure that you aren't switching to a shared IP which hosts websites that are linking to you already - while in all honesty something that would be extremely rare, if it were the case it would likely lead to the devaluation of those links

-IP History: It's also important to know that you aren't moving to a digital neighborhood that's known in the search engines eyes for housing spam. Think about it like sharing your identity, you wouldn't want someone under your name giving talks about illicit topics. Look up your neighbors with a reverse IP lookup tool such as yougetsignal.com before making the jump.

All in all you likely won't see a big impact from switching your IP address - you just want to do a little due diligence to insure that your new digital home is one that's squeaky clean before moving in!

Cheers,
Adam

[Layer7Tech]

great thanks so much for the feedback

[donford]

I have nothing new to add but wanted to say that both Chris and Adam's answers are spot on from my experience, thumbs up to both of them.