Hey everyone. I have a website that for years ranked #1 on google for some pretty huge terms. The website was on a physical server with Hostgator this entire time, until I moved everything over to Linode. On the day of the move, the only thing I did was change the A record for the domain to the new Linode IP address to point to the new server.

On that same day, our organic traffic dropped to about 20% of what is was, and our rankings fell far off the map. There were no content or code changes that day, and the server location with Linode that I picked was even in the same state as the previous physical server.

My research has said this shouldn't (hah) happen with a move unless the server is moved to another country, but it has been almost exactly 3 months now and there has been very little improvement. Its absolutely killing us. Old server was an older centos version with cpannel, new one is ubuntu 12.04 without a control pannel. Nothing big at all changed with the environemnt that google should care about.

Does anyone have any experience with problems like this?

Did you choose a Linode in the same country? People some environmental change is responsible. There are some pretty big sites hosted at Linode. The Onion, for example, Alexa rank of 699 in the US.

EDIT: Did your RDNS change?

Yes, I even picked Dallas, TX Linode, and the old server was in Austin TX I believe.

DNS Kinda changed. Originally the name servers were being run by cpannel on the old server. The day of the switch, on the old server I went in and put in the new IP address for the A record, name servers and such did not change. About a week later (after the drop) I changed the name servers to GoDaddy so I could cancel the old hardware.

But what about your reverse DNS entry? That's something you set on the server provider side of things, not the DNS provider.

That's interesting.. I did not set it up.. when I look it up it points to my members.linode.com account and says:

Top Level Domain: "linode.com"
Country IP Address: UNITED STATES



edit: I just set it up in the control pannel. I looked up how it used to be on the old IP and I THINK it was also generic like that one, but hard to tell 3mo later. Hopefully this helps though.