Recently I have been asked this questions many times; So I thought of putting it in an organized way. For Starters, who do not have any clue of what the heading means – Generally, we buy sites in Shared Hosting. A hosting is tied up with a IP always. So in your case, you neighbour shares the same IP. I am here trying to convince you that if you’re serious it’s not OK.
IP Reputation
Case 1: In 2010, Matt Cutts made a video which validates that shared hosting is still fine. But now there are situations where you could be at risk. In the event your site is hosted on a server with many sites that are considered “spammy,” then yes, your site could be negatively impacted. Here is the video Matt Cutts made that clarifies Google’s position on shared hosting:
Imagine your IP hosts 499 porn sites along with your 1 corporate site; well it already seems fishy.
It’s easy to look up and see who else is hosted on your site. There are plenty of free tools out there to do a reverse IP lookup. I personally use Mxtoolbox.
Case 2: Say you have a site named yourwebsite.com and it shares a host and IP with a large number of sites that is being used as a “link farm” to generate backlinks to “spammy” sites to try and gain position in the SERPs (Search Engine Rank Position).
In this scenario, your site is in jeopardy of being penalized for sharing the same IP as this “link farm” because of the poor quality and violations in which the other thousands of sites on the network have taken part.
Site Speed
“Why does site speed even impact SEO?” Well, it’s because the speed of your site impacts your SERP with Google. Note, a unique IP address does not mean your site will load faster.
What if your website shares the IP address of another high traffic website. If you’re hosting your site on a shared hosting platform that does not do a good job of allocating resources, your site could be slow. But it does guarantee that it doesn’t load slower for some other sites.
Security
Your website could share the IP address with another site that has been marked as malware.
- Some network security programs will “null route” requests to those IP addresses, which would make your website unreachable.
- Some anti-virus software may mark any website with the same IP address as malware, this may raise false alarms against your website.
Good news is, it will not get penalized by Google in such case. Googles shows their famous red screen with an alert which reads, “This site may harm your computer” next to every link for that website which appears in search results. But you’re blocked in tons of places.
Summing up
Having a dedicated IP is not something to worry about in regards to SEO. There are so many more things you should concern yourself with first before focusing on a dedicated IP address.
At the end of the day, it’s not a must have unless you are not with some reputed hosting company like Hostgator or Inmotion or Bluehost. But it’s good to have.
Are you having problem to implement one? Do you have dedicated IP or can shed in more light into this topic? Let us know in the comments below.
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