Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm seriously worried about that if is true.
My sites are ranking badly months ago, particularily from Florida shake. I think having a .com would help (there was regional domains before).
Now I moved to .com 2 months ago domains and noticed that didn't help much, in the meantime my hosting provider became another firm due to an aliance.
I discovered that my site now doesnt have a unique IP
and having one for each site is quite expensive to me.
So please read what [snip] says and tell me if it's true and I MUST buy a unique IP for each hosted domain.
[snip]:
Reason #9: Your Web page does not have unique IP address.
Does your Web site has a unique IP address? If not, your Web site is running the risk of getting banned from the search engines.
Human beings use domain names like yahoo.com, but network computers use IP addresses, which are numeric addresses written as four numbers, separated by periods.
Every domain name translates to a so-called IP address. For example, yahoo.com is translated to "64.58.76.225". Just enter "http://64.58.76.225/" in your Web browser and you'll go to www.yahoo.com.
Many Web hosting services don't give out unique IP addresses to their customers to save money. They assign the same IP address to multiple domain names. This means that several hundred Web sites could all be using the same IP address as your site does.
There are 3 reasons why you need a unique IP address:
If you're sharing an IP address with 50 other sites, you're trusting them not to over-submit or spam the search engines. When a search engine blocks an IP address, all the sites that are sharing that IP address are blocked. You could wind up being banned from the search engine.
If the server or the search engine spider software is misconfigured, the search engine spider may end up obtaining a Web page from another domain with the same IP address. This may mean that the other Web site gets indexed instead of yours, or your Web site will be found for the keywords which are applicable to the other site.
Rumor has it that having your own unique IP address may help your search engine ranking.
So when you select a Web hosting service, make sure that your domain name has a unique IP address, even if it means that you have to pay a bit more for your hosting.
[edited by: pageoneresults at 7:52 pm (utc) on Mar. 23, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics [/edit]
silverbytes, the article you're quoting from sounds as if it wasn't written recently. From what I've seen in the past year or so, virtual hosting no longer seems to be a leading source of SE related problems. I suspect the SEs are more conscientious about using (or banning!) specific domains and rarely punish an IP.
Although life is never all roses, I can't think of any problem over the years which either I or my predecessors could attribute to the shared IP.
ARIN got strict about assigning extra IPs. You need to prove that you need an extra one. If you tell ARIN that you need it just for a hosting account, they will deny you. ARIN insists on use of virtual hosts.
I know that a person cannot apply for just one IP, but I am speaking from hosting provider's point of view. Sooner or later no hosting provider will include a "dedicated IP" with a shared hosting account.
Good reasons are: running a web site that requires SSL, DNS servers.
Why wouldn't you want a unique IP?
I can't think of a single reason that you wouldn't want a unique IP. Any decent host nowadays gives this to you automatically anyways.
Everyone shrugs off the SSL argument: I don't need SSL. Well, guess what - if your business is successful, you will need it at some point. And the move from your "shared" IP to a static IP for SSL is going to be a big enough pain in the ass that you would have wished that you had gotten that static IP in the first place.
Get the static IP.
Another view: Remember that SEs use hundreds of criteria to rank pages. If that static IP gave you .00000001% of an advantage, is it worth it? What about .001%? What about 1%?
If I was a search engine (tm), a named-based virtualhosted site would be worth some points in a spam scoring system.
My advice (for what it is worth) is independently host each site if you want to be sure, I wasted huge amounts of time with this.
Regards
Rod
I can't think of a single reason that you wouldn't want a unique IP. Any decent host nowadays gives this to you automatically anyways.
Everyone shrugs off the SSL argument: I don't need SSL. Well, guess what - if your business is successful, you will need it at some point. And the move from your "shared" IP to a static IP for SSL is going to be a big enough pain in the ass that you would have wished that you had gotten that static IP in the first place.
Another view: Remember that SEs use hundreds of criteria to rank pages. If that static IP gave you .00000001% of an advantage, is it worth it? What about .001%? What about 1%?
But since more and more hosts are using virtual hosting on the same IP, search engine's will more and more adapt to that!
They too know that if 100 site's are on the same IP it doesn't mean they are all owned by the same person.
I'm sure they issue a domain-ban way before a IP-ban!
Because they charge you extra for that service. Of course I prefer to have unique IP, but is more expensive to pass all my sites to unique IP each.
So if it's not necessay I will not do it.
However I've heard advantages (like the user that says the spiders loved his unique IP site)
What do you say?
My favorite non-profit org site has been on one shared IP or another since going live about 7 years back.
Although life is never all roses, I can't think of any problem over the years which either I or my predecessors could attribute to the shared IP.
Mine was some years too, but that doesn't mean that having unique IP wouldn't help... I had bad times with it one time penalized (not sure why.. maybe for other site sharing same IP behaviour?)
For big site's it's probably not a problem to pay for the unique IP, it would cost me 15 euro's a year per IP. For smaller site's that can be quite a big chunk in the total hosting fee.
Would there be other advantages of having a unique IP other then with search engine's?
