Does changing my IP address affect what Google has indexed on my site?

[atlanta404]

I submitted my site to Google in early January, and only my homepage was indexed until early April when Google indexed 50 of my highest level pages. Then after two weeks, Google dropped these pages and now only my homepage is indexed.

About the same time we were dropped, my site moved to a new IP. The new IP was within the same hosting company so the first two parts of the IP address remain the same.

Does the new IP address (although within the same hosting company) have any affect on why Google dropped my pages? Why won't Google do a deeper dive on my site?

Thanks for your help.

[bhartzer]

Genarally speaking, you can change your IP as many times as you want--as long as your site doesn't go down and is always reachable it won't suffer any rankings or "de-indexing of page".

There are generally a few reasons why your pages might have been removed:
- Duplicate Content
- Your site's pages were unreachable
- Lack of links
- The domain's prior history

Most likely the changing of your IP has absolutely nothing to do with only your home page being indexed. I would look to other reasons as to why only the home page is being listed.

I would also look at your log files to determine whether or not Google continues to crawl the site on a regular basis and whether or not that crawling activity stopped when you changed IPs. If they stopped crawling when you changed IPs then your site was most likely unreachable.

[atlanta404]

Moving on to duplicate content - each product on my e-commerce site has its own individual product page.

A visitor to my site can navigate to a specific product page through the homepage through "Shop by Manufacturer" or "Shop by Category". This creates two separate URLs for the same product page - the only difference is the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page.

Any thoughts???

Again, thank you for your help.

[imulus]

Although you are with the same hosting company, did the location of the box which the IP address is tied to change? Our site did the same thing when the box went from a US hosting facility to a Canadian hosting facility. We are a Colorado based company yet we now rank well for Google Canada.

[atlanta404]

Thanks for responding! But we have the same building & same box... Just a different IP...

Any other suggestions??? Thanks again! :-)

[martinuboo]

First off, Google has been dropping pages from their index a bit lately (since Big Daddy change), so it may be "just a temporary Google thing".

Are the missing pages indexed in Yahoo! and MSN?

Are you checking for your pages in Google with the site:domain.com operator?

When you changed the IP address, were any other changes made? Make sure nobody added a robots.txt exclusion or added a meta robots tag (I know this sounds off base, but stranger things have happened).

Your problem maybe related to the same page being accessed via two different URL. That is a potential duplicate content area, although usually the duplicates will get sent to the Supplemental Results and not dropped completely (at least initially).

Here is a great thread on other things to check:

A Dropped Site Checklist (it's real long, but you can just read the first post, but the whole thing is good - last time I took the time to read it all)

As bhartzer said above, verify if Googlebot (look for the newer Mozilla useragent too) is crawling the missing pages.

Do you use Google Sitemaps? If so, what do the diagnostic stats say?

Do you/did you have any problems with www and non www pages both showing up? Are you using a 301 redirect?

Having gone through something similar a long time ago. Double check everything (especially anything server side that the host could have changed at the time of the IP address change).

Hope that helps.

martin