Guilt Through Association, looking to change IP Options

[raj_freind]

I was wondering about site indexing which got lost suddenly in Jan'08 and haven't got back yet, i need to know if anyone here read about "Guilt Through Association "

what if i change IP for my site, will it effect to present ranking?

[incrediblehelp]

Changing IPs should matter. Was the previous IP banned?

[Randy]

As a general rule the search engines do not ban IP numbers. There are simply too many sites out there on shared hosting plans, so if they did they'd end up throwing out a lot of babies with the bathwater.

If the site has been de-indexed and the search engine spiders aren't visiting anymore, there's a cause for that reaction. IP wouldn't be in the top 20 things on my list to look at though. If this is what you're running into the first thing I'd do personally is set up a browser to emulate Googlebot and surf the site to see what happens. You can emulate everything except their IP numbers, so if your host is doing something silly like blocking spiders to save bandwidth it'll be immediately apparent 99.99% of the time.

I'd also look seriously into every file to make sure the site hadn't been hacked. And run something like Xenu on it and let it look for external links to make sure nobody had hidden some links to shady places in your site. I'd also sign the site up for Google's Webmaster Tools to see if they raised any red flags there.

Now, if your site hasn't de-indexed, but simply isn't ranking anymore, that's a whole other series of things to look for. Beginning with whether you were previously buying or selling links.