: What is the SEO impact of moving my domain to another IP address and what is the right way of doing this? I am planning to move several websites to a new hosting provider - keeping the

@Merenda212

As long as the domain and content remains the same, changing IP addresses should have not affect on SEO. Moving from Canadian to US IP's wont affect your SEO.

The only potential gotcha could be if somehow the IP address has been backlisted due to spam or other misuse, although this is more commonly, but not exclusively, an issue with Email than Web Domains. Here's a good list of blacklists and ways to check if your IP address/domain is blacklisted.

Here's a discussion from Matt Cutts on IP addresses - www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/
For the move, obviously you want the least amount of down time as possible. The best way to do this is to do a code/db freeze then get the new server to have a perfect working copy of the old server. You can test wether or not the new server is setup to process the domain properly by editing your hosts file to point your domain at the new IP address. If it works fine then you can start the DNS Transfer and users shouldn't notice any downtime as they will either see the curent working site or the working new site, depending on how fast their DNS server updates.

Vote Up Vote Down