I.P Address

Static IP necessary for good ranking?

[rominosj]

Hello,

I would like to know if it is true that a static IP is necessary for goog SE ranking, or if a dynamic (shared) IP will do?

Also, can you recommend a tool to verify if I am really getting a static IP that is not being shared with some other website?

Thanks,

Romino

[martinibuster]

>>>I would like to know if it is true that a static IP is necessary for goog SE ranking...

Nope. Not necessary.

[MarkHutch]

I agree. I don't think it makes a difference.

[moltar]

Usually if you get a dedicated IP, you can just visit your website by directly entering the IP it into the browser.

Also you could do reversed IP search in All The Web and see if any other sites are hosted on that IP, but that is only if ATW spidered any other sites on that IP.

[coburn]

As far as I know G refences your domain (www.mydomain.com) and not your IP. So no probs if you change your IP.

Recently switched hosts - and with it IP address. It took less than 4 hours for G to pick up the new host after I'd contacted the old.

[karmov]

The main reason people suggest a unique IP for your site is to stay out of bad neighbourhoods. In the past, SE's could ban an IP for bad behaviour. This is fine if the owner of the site had a unique IP, but if it was a shared host, everyone gets banned. I'm not sure if this continues to be a real risk, but most people do it anyways. There are a million minor reasons why a unique IP is better, but this has been the big one for some time.

So, is a unique static IP necessary? No. Is it a really good idea to help protect your investment? Deffinitely.

[Andrew Thomas]

I have shared IP, and havent found a problem so far.

[Eric_Lander]

I do not think that a static IP is needed for a good ranking. Many sites out there that rank well were created by webmasters who had no idea that static IPs were even available to them.

I've been working closely with a hosting company recently to see if there is any correlation to spiders resolving domains down to IP addresses for the purpose of also looking into their "neighborhood". Over the course of the past 6 months or so, we have not seen anything to indicate that is what is happening.

The hypothesis before beginning this excercise was that if you had a range of 10-15 domains, with similar content sources and page structures -- hosted on the same server with only the fourth octet of the IP's differing -- that a possible red flag may go up.

After creating the sites, submitting them to Google, Ink, etc. -- and NOT working on link pop at all. We found no evidence of the engines treating the neighborhood negatively (or favorably for that matter).

Having said all that, I think the only real advantage of a static IP is that you can usually find out where DNS issues may exist by performing trace routes to IP's as opposed to domains. That, and the other things mentioned here already, like typing in the IP as opposed to the TLD.

[bakedjake]

It's not necessary for good ranking.

There are other, sometimes significant, benefits to having one though. Do a search here - there's been some pretty good discussion on the topic in the past.