Forum Moderators: phranque
Does it really matter if your website is on a Virtual shared ip address? Does google really penalize you for setting up your site this way?
What advantages does a Dedicated Static IP Address have over a Virtual shared ip address?
Can a search engine really not recognize a website if they are on a shared ip?
Please Advise.
thanks.
Yes it does matter. If you are using a virtual server there are implications for search engines because they do not see your site as being unique in amongst the many others that are also listed under that one virtaul server.
A static IP address is definately the way to go, but you may expect to pay a bit more for your web hosting, i think its well worth it.
Regards,
Andreas
Shared IPs are fine. Here are the potential issues I've seen mentioned:
- the current HTTP spec is version 1.1 which was designed to work with multiple hosts on a single IP. HTTP/1.0 and prior didn't - you needed an IP for every host. Any spiders that aren't using the HTTP/1.1 protocol will *not* be able to recognize multiple sites on a single IP. There was a point in time when most spiders were using the HTTP/1.0 protocol which made shared IPs a no no. But currently every SE spider is up to 1.1 (as far as I know) so that's no longer an issue.
- penalties. Some people believe that a search engine may penalize IPs instead of domains, meaning you could be the innocent victim of someone else's penalty. This has probably happened in the past (when one IP per host was the norm), but I very much doubt it happens now.
- linking. There's a lot of speculation that incoming links from the same IP (actually the same Class C block) may not count the same as IPs from different Class Cs. That's purely speculation and only applies if you have multiple inbounds from the same IP.
I'm sure the overwhelming majority of the sites in the SE's indexes are on shared IPs.
