Transfering a domain

I am transfering a domain from one IP to another. Is there a way I can make this tranfer and easy one with out losing positioning. Should I let google know. I Thought there was a form the google supplied but I have not yet to find one.

Thanks

Google is notorious for slow updates of its DNS servers. If possible, leave a copy of your site on the old IP until Googlebot starts visiting the new one.

Gringo.

Agreed .. I advise to leave a copy on the old server for at least 3 months, that might be overkill. but rather safe than sorry.

In saying that, I've never had too much trouble changing servers myself.

if you are just switchiung the ip address of the server for your domain there shouldn't be a problem, if you are switching domain as well as srever leave a redirect up for 1-3 months on the old servers

Jason - don't you think there could be a problem if he changes his IP and Google doesn't update the DNS information ?

If G continues to spider the old IP, and he doesn't leave his site up there, he could find himself out of the index for a couple of months until they update their DNS servers.

Grinbgo.

Agreed, Google does not look up DNS info in real-time, they have found that doing this increases processing overhead and bandwidth considerable, so they cache the data instead.

If the IP were to change, then when google does it crawl it would most likely find a 404, or whatever new info was put on IP.. So best thing to do is leave the data on the old IP while changing the DNS info with your registrar to the new server / hosting provider. During this period, don't do any major updates!!

aah, so having the redirect up to the new server work?

But where would you redirect to? The new IP? If you do it wrong, you may find a ban on your site and if you do it right you'll just get the new IP number indexed, not the domain name. I still think the best solution is to keep 2 sites running until you're sure Google knows about the new IP and is spidering it as normal.

[Afterthought]Also, if he's using virtual hosting a redirect to his new IP will do him no good at all - it won't even go to his site. [/Afterthought]

Gringo

Personally I would hesitate to leave the old one up for more than a few days. Google does not look fondly on mirror sites and if you post two copies of your site might Google not think that's what's going on?

What I'd do is move it to the new IP, leave a copy on the old IP while you await DNS migration (24 to 72 hours from the time you request it) then I would put up a single page on the old IP with about 100 words related to your topic and a text link to the new site position. This link should be based on domain name NOT IP address. If you're hosted on Linux you may also want to throw up an htaccess file that will redirect visitors to the "new" URL just in case DNS encounters some hiccups. That's just a best practice sort-of-thing.

To me this is the only safe way to get this all accomplished, and I've never had any problems doing it this way in the past.

If any of you know any drawbacks to this please feel free to let me know.

Dave - the drawbacks are the following ...

You're right in saying that DNS usually takes place in a couple of days, but only for your host, not for Google. Google often takes up to 2 months to change their own DNS servers.

This means that Google will continue spidering the old IP address and the cached version of your page in their database will be just that 1 page with your keywords, or whatever you leave up there.

Therefore, it's best to leave an old copy of the web up there for Google to spider - there is no problem with duplicate content, because Google can only see one version. As soon as you notice Googlebot spidering the web on the new IP, you take the old version down.

If you don't do this you could find yourself out of the index for 2 months.

Gringo.