Does your virtual hosting company affect rank?

[ariff44]

I am choosing a new hosting company for my next site (I am unsatisfied with my present one). I will be using shared hosting but with a unique IP.

Besides the normal considerations, my question is this:

If I host on a virtual server that has penalized sites, even if I have my own IP, will I be penalized by association? If so, what can I do to prevent this besides getting dedicated hosting?

Also, what in the heck is a "bad neigborhood"? Thanks in advance for your always excellent advice.

[andreasfriedrich]

How would Google know that your website physically resides on the same machine as a penalized site? Of course they could look at the IPid [research.att.com], but that would be lotīs of work for nothing.

Besides that why would Google try to penalize you when you have your own domain when they wonīt even penalize you when you share an IP address with a site that has been penalized. That would be illogical.

Andreas

[jady]

A bad neighborhood is someone that you do not want to link from and to. You dont want to be associated with a site that has this "tag" from bad, unethicle SEO and link-farming!