Changing Hosting And Google

[annie]

I've seen people ask if there's anything they should do when they change hosting (and hence IP address) to make sure they're not dropped from search engines.

 

I monitor my logs on the old host as well as this one.

 

So far since I moved my site, Googlebot has gobbled up 5.88 MB, counting May 9-22. No visits to the old site.

 

There are very few hits to the old site.

 

May 11:

Quite a few humans

 

May 12:

One or two human visitors, and a few bots

 

May 14th:

h*tp://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler was all over the site

 

May 15th:

Apparently human, but I have my doubts (typical bot behavior), from:

lager.netcraft.com

 

May 13th, 16th, 17th and 18th, 7 hits total from:

Pompos/1.3 h*tp://dir.com/pompos.html

 

I got some the 15th and 19th and an occasional hit other days from:

61.135.131.124 - - [19/May/2004:11:03:28 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3860 "-" "google"

 

Looks like some kind of copycat bot?

 

IP number from:

inetnum: 61.135.0.0 - 61.135.255.255

netname: CNCGROUP-BJ

descr: CNCGROUP Beijing province network

descr: China Network Communications Group Corporation

descr: No.156,Fu-Xing-Men-Nei Street,

descr: Beijing 100031

country: CN

 

On the 20th I got some human traffic from edu.communitynet.ca

and a bot from comcast.net:

Mozilla 4.19 Compatible bot ( visitinfo@yahoo.com )

 

No visits May 21, 22 or 23 (so far).

 

I get the occasional spam mail coming through.

[TCH-Rob]

The old site should dwindle to zero visits by humans and all bots visiting via name. Visitors by IP will still hit the old site. People only know your domain name, your domain name only knows where it is supposed to point. You shouldn't have to do anything to keep Google comming, it finds you by site name, links to your site.

 

I know if I move and keep my same phone number I still have the same number of creditors calling. Changing hosts shouldnt affect anything.

[annie]

Well, in the past things were slightly different, and that's why I posted this. Because the rumors still persist. Rumors that are no longer accurate.

 

It's a throwback to the time where most sites were on dedicated IP addresses. The first year or two my site was on it's own IP address, and the IP address had a big effect on how search engines saw your site in the past. As shared virtual hosting has become the norm, the search engines have adapted.