How does google rank sites that are virtual hosted?

[flex55]

I've heard that in some cases, google penalize sites that are virtual-hosted, in some cases. i found something about it at slashdot.org, but they didn't mention in which cases (see the excerpt below with a quotation from Craig Silverstein - technology director at Google.)

Google and IP address.
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by Anonymous Coward

Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don't come from a unique ip address. Please don't just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation.

Craig:

I can't just deny it? What are my other choices? [:)] 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--thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!

[jeremy goodrich]

Google might handle it correctly, but there have been historical problems with some engines not handling virtually hosted domains correctly.

That being said, if anything gives an ISP the chance to serve my domain / site the wrong way, that gives me more reason to go some place else :)

Though even if Google handles it right today, who's to say the next time they upgrade their spider that they don't remember to include the http 1.1 routines, and resort to only handling the http 1.0 stuff? (at least, isn't that part of the technical difference & why spiders had the problem before?)

thanks for sharing that quote.

[mbauser2]

Though even if Google handles it right today, who's to say the next time they upgrade their spider that they don't remember to include the http 1.1 routines, and resort to only handling the http 1.0 stuff? (at least, isn't that part of the technical difference & why spiders had the problem before?)

If Googlebot didn't use the "Host" header (the important part of HTTP/1.1), 80-90% of the domains on the Web would be dinged as duplicate content sites. I think they'd notice the database shrinkage.

There is much too much worrying done about this particular subject.

[JayC]

Just to get that quoted answer to align with the posted question: the answer does not give an affirmative answer to the question "does Google penalize websites with shared IPs?" ("virtual hosted" would be an inaccurate term; even most sites on their own unique IPs are "virtual" if they are on servers that host more than one domain). In fact, the last sentence of the answer states that it dispels the myth.

There's no ranking "penalty" for shared IPs. What that answer says is that there's a chance that your host could err in setting up your domain, and if it did Google (or any other spider) wouldn't find your site. If that were to happen, though, you probably couldn't get to your site by typing your domain name into your browser's address bar either.

As mbauser2 says, it's really not worth worrying about.

And by the way, flex55, welcome to WebmasterWorld!

[liquidstar]

I'm a real world example. I've had both types of accounts and had no trouble with Google (or any other engine) indexing both of them with no penalty problems.

[Beachboy]

No problems here either with dedicated or virtual IPs.

[MarkHutch]

We have eleven domains hosted on five different virtual host servers. No problems here. Google spiders all of our pages each month with no problems.

P.S. Your problem might be with your virtual host and have nothing to do with Google.

[flex55]

Thanks guys!
It's been quite an informative thread. As I'm new to the "googling" science, so it's been quite good to have the answers from the community!

f5.