Desert Web Designs Blog

A question I’m often asked at work (tech support/sales for a major internet software company) by other tech support reps is, “Does having a shared hosting IP affect Search Engine Ranking?” Often times they are asking, because our customers are asking them, and for whatever reason, I’m considered the resident SEO expert for my team. I’ll admit I do know SEO, but not sure if I’m quite at the point where I would consider myself an “expert” per se. Anyways, it’s nice to get the compliment.

The long and short of this answer is “No! Having a shared IP address will not adversely affect your search engine ranking.”

The flip side to this question is “Will having a dedicated/unique IP address help my search engine ranking?” Again, the answer to this question is a resounding “No! Having a dedicated IP address will not give you a boost in the search engine rankings.”

Now are their benefits to having dedicated IP addresses? Yes. Are their SEO benefits to having a dedicated IP address? Minimal at best. Will it hurt you by not having one? No.

In a 2003 interview with Slashdot, Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein answered this specific question accordingly:

Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception.

Now I know some of you skeptics out there may be thinking “Well that was 5 years ago, that’s a long time ago in a rapidly changing environment such as the internet.” And you’d be right. It’s very likely that in 5 years Google has changed their ranking algorithm. However, at the end of 2006, Google software engineer and head of their Webspam team, Matt Cutts answered that question in his blog post “Myth busting: virtual hosts vs. dedicated IP addresses”

There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP)…I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.

While searching for these articles, I came across another blog post from SEO/SEM specialist Jim Boykin who takes the exact opposite approach in his blog post “SEO Tip - Get Your Own IP Address.” Jim recommends getting your own dedicated IP address for every website you own. Now obviously I’m in no position to argue with someone who has been doing this much longer than me, but the fellows at Google are. I’m not saying that Jim is wrong, all I’m saying is his advice contradicts the information from Craig and Matt.

Looking at the PageRank of Jim’s site versus mine, Jim’s site reports a PageRank of 5 while mine shows a PageRank of 3. Now there are some other contributing factors here. Primarily the fact that Jim’s site has been around 2 years longer than mine which gives more time to link build and gain PageRank. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for me to have a higher PageRank than Jim, I just don’t put much time into the marketing of my site because of the workload I have. It would not be beneficial to myself or my clients (current or future) to actively advertise and gain more work at this time. I’m not trying to make excuses for my lower PageRank, just stating the facts. But I don’t think that the dedicated IP address accounts for the difference.

In closing:
Are there web site benefits to having a dedicated IP address: Yes.
Are there SEO benefits to having a dedicated IP address: No.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.