Back in December my friend and ZippyKid owner, Vid Luther and I had an interesting discussion on Facebook regarding dedicated IPs and SEO.
The discussion stemmed from the original thought provoking post by Vid:
“Dear ‘SEO consultants’, Please stop telling people to put their sites on different IP’s. Every time I hear this, I tell our customers to find different SEO consultants.”
Being an SEO Consultant myself, I took offense to Vid’s post and wanted to clarify how SEO, & Dedicated IPs work together. From our conversation on Facebook, Vid invited me to share a few thoughts on the ZippyKid Blog.
Now, I respect the point Vid is making and it’s correct most of the time…BUT there are scenarios where a dedicated IP for hosting your website makes sense. These scenarios are what I want to highlight and review to help you make an informed decision before requesting a dedicated IP from your hosting provider.
Three Considerations of Hosting and IP addresses for your website.
The ip address that’s assigned to your website, depends on your hosting provider. Providers are assigned IP addresses by ARIN, and astute users can figure out where things are hosted by just looking at the ip addresses of some popular providers.
PERFORMANCE & SPEED
There is a good possibility that 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. You may ask, “Why does site speed even impact SEO?” Well, it’s because the speed of yoursite impacts your SERP (search engine ranking position) with Google. Keep in mind, a unique ip address does not mean your site will load faster.
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. Most modern browsers may display an alert which reads, “This site may harm your computer” next to every link for that website which appears in search results. You can learn more about what to do if you are infected on this Google answer.
SSL
SSL encrypts traffic to your site, it’s usually used by e-commerce sites, and sites where personal information is shared. The latest version of SSL doesn’t require a unique ip address, but due to older browsers ( mostly on Windows XP) not supporting this, it’s still safer/best practice to get a unique ip address. This doesn’t affect SEO directly, but is too large of a reason not to mention.
editors note: I recommend SSL on all sites, your password can be seen in clear text when you log in from a public wifi network. So, WordCamps, Starbucks, other conferences. There are also things done with SSL that make your website faster.
The Facts on SEO and Shared IP addresses
Now let’s assume you have gone with a reliable and trusted shared hosting provider for your site. You’re down to really one concern that you have to take into account: Google penalties due to links or malware.
So, first off let’s review a fact that Matt Cutts clarified back in 2006: “… there was recently a discussion on a NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) email list about virtual hosting vs. dedicated IP addresses. They were commenting on the misconception that having multiple sites hosted on the same IP address will in some way affect the PageRanks of those sites. There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP).”
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:
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