I often visit many reputable search engine optimization forums on my internet travels. And on these travels I see more and more threads where people state that changing your website IP address or template will affect your search engine positions. While some say that this will seriously harm your positions, others claim that nothing serious will happen. But who is right? I decided to do a small case study to check it out myself so I could be absolutely sure, and in this post you will see the results of this case study.
I have a small affiliate website that has been optimized for a moderately competitive keyword, which was created over six months ago. To be totally honest with you, the website is not a profitable one. It still generates a few sales every now and again, however, the money I do get from it is not substantial at all. That’s why I decided to use this site for my case study. Basically, even if the website did lose all of its search engine positions, it wouldn’t hurt my budget at all.
The first thing I did was copy all the content from this website including images, alt tags, etc. I also wrote down the names of all the website pages. I then registered a new hosting account with a new provider, transferred my website domain name there and changed the website template. This basically meant that I had a website with a new IP address and a new template.
The next thing I did was create a few pages and added the old content to this “new” site. The name of these pages was exactly the same as they were on the “old” site. I did not change the content, so this remained the same. That was all I did with this website. I left it for a month to give the search engine spiders time to crawl the website and to see if there would be an increase or decrease in the positions. A month later I checked the tool which recorded my website positions for the whole period of the case study. I was satisfied with the results I found. As always, proof is in the pudding, so here is a screenshot:
As you can see, the third horizontal red line marks the day (9 Jan) when my website’s IP address and template were changed. On that particular day my website was at fourth position in the Google SERP’s for its main keyword. Today, on February 7th, it is in the second position.
So, who was it that said that changing the website IP address or template would decrease your SERP positions? Judging by these results, I can say with total confidence that it will not affect your positions and this case study proves it. At the moment I am in the process of moving some of my unprofitable affiliate websites to a cheaper hosting service to cut down on my expanses. I will let you know if I see any serious changes in my positions; however, I’m sure this will not happen.
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#1 by daniel - April 3rd, 2009 at 08:59
nice case study, from my experience i can say that you are right, neither ip address nor template will decrease your se positions.
#2 by Ilya - May 3rd, 2009 at 18:12
What script are you using to monitor your position in the SERPS?
#3 by Sergey Lorens - May 4th, 2009 at 00:03
I use “Advanced Web Rankings”
#4 by KrisBelucci - June 2nd, 2009 at 03:41
Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for posting.
#5 by AndrewBoldman - June 4th, 2009 at 20:13
Great post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new subscriber- me!
#6 by Crism Betewsky - July 6th, 2009 at 17:43
You know, I don’t read blogs. But yours is really worth beeing read.