Dedicated IP Addresses and SEO

Every website is hosted on an IP Address, a numeric identifier that helps computers locate the server that hosts your website's information. In the context of web hosting, IP Addresses come in two flavors: Dedicated and Shared. A Shared IP could host hundreds or thousands of websites, this is otherwise known as Name-Based Hosting or Name-Based Virtual Hosts. In contrast, a Dedicated IP hosts only a single website.

It's been a popular myth that Google and other search engines give a higher ranking to those websites hosted on Dedicated IPs. Matt Cutts is currently the head of Google's Webspam team, but for a long time has been an authority on the operation of Google's search engine and SEO techniques. Matt Cutts confirms that Google does not penalize websites that are hosted on a Shared IP address. For more information, you can read his full blog post on Virtual Hosts vs Dedicated IP Addresses.

While Matt Cutts confirms that there is no direct SEO benefit to having a dedicated IP, there are a few indirect benefits.

Bad Neighborhoods

Will Google block an IP address from Google rankings if it's identified as a Bad Neighborhood?

First, let's define a Bad Neighborhood. A Bad Neighborhood is any website that contains malicious content or uses tricks to attempt to "game" a search engine's results. Some common examples of what you would find at a Bad Neighborhood website include:

• Spamming
• Link Farms
• Virus or Malware

It's well known that Google will block Bad Neighborhood websites by domain name from their search results. But if the behavior is malicious enough, will Google block results from that IP as a whole?

At the time of this writing, we haven't been able to find a clear answer to this question. The best answer we can find is a quote from GoogleGuy (alleged Google employee) on the WebMasterWorld Forums:

"We can do it, but we prefer not to. Virtual hosting means that innocent sites and spam sites can be on the same Class C block--or even on the same IP address. Besides, it's not so hard for a NastyJerk to move to a different hosting company. So in general we avoid this."

GoogleGuy confirms that "in general" Google will avoid blocking by IP address. Does this mean that they will block by IP address in extreme circumstances? Have they ever done this before? What about other search engines?

As a precaution, we recommend that you use a Dedicated IP to avoid the potential block.

Downtime

In most cases of small outages, Google will not penalize your domain. However, if Google sees that your domain is frequently offline, they may drop your rank. In their eyes, you are not doing your best to serve content to its visitors if your site is down.

DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are one of the most common causes of site outages. A discussion of DDOS attacks are beyond the scope of this article, but know that during a DDOS the IP address is the target. The most common way of mitigating DDOS attacks is to Null Route the target IP, effectively cutting it off from the internet altogether. In the case of a Shared IP, this means that hundreds or thousands of websites may be taken offline until the source of the attack is identified and stopped.

With a dedicated IP, your site will remain online even if IP addresses on the same server are Null Routed and inaccessible on the internet. Having a Dedicated IP can improve your site's uptime and, indirectly, help with your search rankings.