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.

About the Author

Aloha, I'm Amit Ghosh, a web entrepreneur and avid blogger. Bitten by entrepreneurial bug, I got kicked out from college and ended up being millionaire and running a digital media company named Aeron7 headquartered at Lithuania.

Related Posts

Above Image: A man is seen trapped amid the debris of the under-construction flyover after it...

Have you ever read Kalidas? That guy was sexologist!! It’s immense sex in his books. Ok, we all...

I caught up with bad fever this week. So I thought of seeing some lol videos this sunday and...

2 Comments
 
  1. Andrea M April 27, 2016 at 8:51 pm Reply

    The whole article was about why we should upgrade but then at the end it discourages it. Why so?

    • Amit Ghosh May 1, 2016 at 3:41 am Reply

      Not discouraging; If you are serious then it is must. Just telling it is on the bottom list. There are tons of other things that needed fixing.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.