Why has Googlebot not accessed my site?

[handcrafteduk]

Hi everyone,

I've got a question I was hoping some of you can help with? For the last year Googlebot has accessed my homepage at least once every four days. That is until I changed hosts on the 15th August. Now, the homepage has not been accessed since 16th August.

Has anyone got any ideas as to why this might be?

Many thanks,

Gary
Unique gifts from HandcraftedUK, Unique Ethnic Gifts and Ethnic Musical Instruments Gifts from worldwide

[incrediblehelp]

How do you know this? From the raw logs or from webmaster tools?

Also is the website still up in both locations? If not then that could be why, but it should be temporarily.

[handcrafteduk]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I got the information from the webmaster tools.

The site is still up in both locations. As the site was moved a couple of weeks ago do you know how long it should be before the original location (with the first host) is no longer working?

Thanks again.

[incrediblehelp]

I always wait a month or so to be safe. Either way you should be getting spidered at the new location by now if you have a normal amount of back links.

[Conficio]

Well, check your robots.txt (I assume it is the site in your footer).

You seem to have accessed it with Wordpad.

http://www.handcrafteduk.com/robots.txt

It has content that does not belong there. This might confuse Googlebot. Don't know for sure.

Also, check your raw logs and see if any other robot has shown up (yahoo, msn, ...)? Do they read the robots.txt?

K<o>

[handcrafteduk]

I think the problem might be that the site is active at the new IP address (84.18.207.121) as well as still being active on the IP of the old host (70.84.52.133)

How do I go about getting the website as being recognised from the new IP only? I have tried to contact the old host to ask them to make their IP inactive for my site but, so far, no reply.

Thanks

[handcrafteduk]

Originally Posted by Conficio

Well, check your robots.txt (I assume it is the site in your footer).

You seem to have accessed it with Wordpad.

http://www.handcrafteduk.com/robots.txt

It has content that does not belong there.

I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to the robot.txt file. Can you tell me what shouldn't be there please?

Thanks.

[wige]

Which IP computers go to is actually determined by how long it takes for the domain name servers to update. Generally this happens within 48 hours.

[espmartin]

Its a matter of changing the DNS servers to the new IP. Enter your old hosting account login page, and access your control panel. From there, modify the NS (NameServers):

• ns1.old-dns-host.com
• ns2.old-dns-host.com

to

• ns1.new-dns-host.com
• ns1.new-dns-host.com

[handcrafteduk]

Originally Posted by espmartin

Its a matter of changing the DNS servers to the new IP. Enter your old hosting account login page, and access your control panel. From there, modify the NS (NameServers):

• ns1.old-dns-host.com
• ns2.old-dns-host.com

to

• ns1.new-dns-host.com
• ns1.new-dns-host.com

Thanks. I've logged into my old control panel and it doesn't look like I have the option of doing that!

[incrediblehelp]

Handcraft you have to do this where you domains was registered at.

[Orion]

Originally Posted by handcrafteduk

How do I go about getting the website as being recognised from the new IP only? I have tried to contact the old host to ask them to make their IP inactive for my site but, so far, no reply.

Ftp back into the old site if it's still live on the IP (after you have the site live on the new servers.. see the comments on making sure your site is on the NEW host). Delete all the files in the ftp... make sure to also delete / remove ALL email accounts.

I had an issue once where a bunch of people couldn't email me cause they were with the same data center I USED to be with. After I moved when they tried to email me I wouldn't get it.. reason... their server looked for my domain and it was still on a server at the old datacenter so it sent the mail there instead of searching the web. This happens especially if you have internal DNS servers within a datacenter or server.

if you have access to a reseller or admin control panel for the server.. delete or remove the site that can help in some cases.

[ackilles]

You might want to email your old host and tell them to delete the old DNS entries they have for your domain.

[qh4dotcom]

Another possibility could be that the new IPs from your new webhost are blacklisted, especially if other customers share them.

[wige]

If you are still experiencing problems, is Google still crawling the old site?

On an old document created by the founders of Google, they talk about some of the issues they encountered when creating a large scale spider. One issue involved the number of DNS requests the spider required, and the solution they implemented was to cache all known DNS entries, that would be updated more slowly than a traditional DNS database. In theory, this system could mean that unless your old host stops responding to requests for host: yourdomain.com, the Googlebot will continue using the old IP. As soon as a bad host message is returned, Googlebot should fetch the new IP address.

NOTE: this comment is based on EXTREMELY outdated information, and is contrary to my experiences with Google crawling some of my sites after moving from one host to another, but might be an isolated issue you have encountered.

[handcrafteduk]

Hi everyone,

Thanks so much for the replies, they're really appreciated!

Googlebot is accessing various pages of my site only not the homepage! It's perhaps a temporary thing that will sort itself out?

The access logs on the new host confirm googlebot has visited whilst the logs on with the old host are showing no bots have accessed. I guess that's a good thing!

Gary