Effects of being in a 'Bad neighbourhood'

My hosting provider has been branded a 'Sleaze Host'

[marcel]

Last weekend I noticed that some of my mails weren't getting through, or they were automatically being thrown into the Junk folder. Checked my logs and found that mails being sent from my IP addresses were being blocked by my own SMTP server as they were blacklisted.

I then went to Spamhaus.org to check, and sure enough an entire IP range in which my IP addresses are in was blacklisted as my Hosting provider (I have a Dedicated Server) was branded a 'Sleaze Host. (Although the list of IPs was enormous, with all sorts of #*$! and Warez domains, my own IP addresses (7) were not listed)

Does being in such a 'bad' IP neighbourhood affect SE rankings? (I haven't noticed any decline yet in the SERPs or in visitor numbers)

BTW, my hosting provider is working on the problem.

[canadafred]

Does being in such a 'bad' IP neighbourhood affect SE rankings? I think this still applies and it can be significant. Google used to provide lists of spammed out IPs, I haven't seen one in a while though. They'd do this to warn web site owners of the potential ranking effects. The link farms virtual hosting mega monsters are usually the worse penalized though.

Having international IP addresses isn't such a good idea either.

It's always best to pay a little extra and walk to your neighbourhood web hosting company, do a little IP research, ask a few questions, get to know them by name, send a holiday greeting ... it's generally the safest IP bet.

[marcel]

Thanks for your answer Fred,

Google used to provide lists of spammed out IPs

I didn't know that, food for thought...

My hosting provider is local (the Netherlands), but they are a budget host. I might have to look into moving. When checking the blacklist history I see that this is not the first time this IP range has been blocked.