John Mueller, a search advocate in Google, stated in an interview on Reddit when asked about losing Google ranking when moving to a replacement server. In other words, does changing IP address matter? In this regard, he replied.
“When you change your IP address which may be due to changing server or web host does not affect Google ranking and SEO, but it temporarily affects Google Crawl Rate.”
Understanding Google Crawling and Crawling Rate is necessary before we move further. Crawling is the way during which Search engines like Google send a request(Bot) to the web pages to read and analyze the page’s content. Crawling is the first step towards recognition by any search engine and for appearance in search results.
Google discovers all the website’s URLs present in webs. It visits and starts crawling whether the website consists of one page (Home Page) or multiple pages called a sitemap.
Google discovers the content of the pages and analyzes what the web pages are about.
It renders all the information regards the web pages, including text, images, videos, and embedded files, on the webpage. Then stores all the information on their server. Google can then decide where it is often seen when someone searches on the internet for something close to your content.
Crawl rate is the number of requests Google crawler(Googlebot) makes to any site while crawling it to analyze. Usually, Googlebot makes five requests per second to your websites, and the crawl rate is constant.
Therefore, the user cannot change how Google crawls sites. Crawl rates depend on the response of your server when crawling happens. Therefore, when issues are at the forefront the rate will change.
See also: Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update Received on 14th August
Why a User Might Find a Sudden Spike or Dip in the Crawling Rate?
Googlebot works in algorithms that maintain the crawling rate and prevents overloading during crawling.
The Googlebot algorithm suspects these changes when a user shifts to the new IP address, maybe due to changing host or a server. It starts analyzing the changes that happened after moving to a replacement IP address and crawls.
Still, Google is more careful while crawling until it figures out the server capacity and how quickly and efficiently the server can respond to the crawling requests a time.
A user may find a sudden spike or a dip within a crawling rate because the server is new to Google’s crawling tool. It probably takes some while to urge conversant in the new server and achieve its standard crawling rate.
Therefore, the spike and the dip usually happens when you continuously update existing page contents or include new web pages(a sitemap) to your site.
And forget to ask Google crawlers to crawl the pages. Then you’ll see a spike within the crawling rate on your site.
Drops within the crawling rate seem when the content in your website is non-understandable by the Googlebot.
This can happen if some resources were blocked automatically when it is shifted to a new server. Then, you need to unblock all the precise resources like CSS, JavaScript.
Then permit access for an equivalent to Googlebot for straightforward understanding. Ensuring that the resources aren’t kept idle may decrease the dipping issue.
If the new server features a lower capacity of responding to the requests causes server errors. In that case, Googlebot automatically takes back the recommendations to avoid overloading on the server.