Switching the IP?

[Asher]

I am currently in the process of migrating a site, the domain will stay the same, it will go from example.com to example.com.  The only thing that is changing is the IP address and the host.  The server's will still be in America.

I have done research on this question and have gotten varied answers, some saying that the ip change will affect the SEO rankings depending on where country is, and some saying that Google only looks at the URL not the ip address in terms of rankings.  Does anyone have an answer so I can be prepared and mitigate as much damage as possible?

[Davenport-Tractor]

Jason,

We have had experience with this, and here is what we found. First it did NOT hurt our SEO scores from any of the measuring company's or metrics.

Where we did see an improvement is our website performance. We are now on a stand alone server, so our performance has greatly improved, and we are able to present a page much faster. In addition, server crashing has greatly improved. Where we have seen a hit is our ability to automatically send an e-mail "order shipped" response. Our e-mail message is getting refused by certain e-mail hosts, specifically ATT based address. Somehow the server space provider has a block of IP address that have been marked as not so desirable. We never send out spam, but it seems that someone close to our IP address block does, so the entire IP block is rejected by ATT.

So to answer your question the IP address has not caused a SEO reset or degrade of our Authority or rank, however you should be cautious about what your neighbors are doing with respect to sending out e-mails. Perhaps you could get a list of IP address that your hosting provider uses, then check those address with respect to spammers, before you commit to a hosting provider.

[Asher]

Thanks for that.  What you are experiencing by the way could be because the server does not have a reverse dns entry.  A lot of servers do not come with those and that could also be affecting your ability to send out email.  Also be sure that your spf records are setup correctly so that they are viewed as credible.  I had a similar issue a while ago, and it had very little to do with my ip and very much to do with a lack of a reverse dns.  Also, you should run a blacklist check on the mail ip to ensure that it is not listed on 1 of the 150 spam lists.  I use mxtoolbox to check that.  Hope that helps.