I am planning to launch a small website on cheap hosting as part of an online marketing campaign to support a main site, and someone has suggested it would be a good idea from an SEO perspective to get a dedicated IP address. I am not sure what the benefits of that would be though. If anyone could advise on the pros and cons of a dedicated IP with my hosting package that would be very helpful.
Oliver
The only advantage I can see is the C block IP theory that search engines algorithms would give less weight to a backlink from a site on a similar IP range. Most SEO experts would at least agree a little bit on this point.
Some folks think backlinks from a site on a dedicated IP address are worth more than a shared one.
I personally don't think the SEs care so much.
Because I have two hosting accounts: a VPS with Knownhost (for my main site), and a shared plan with Dreamhost (for everything else + a backup if my VPS goes down)... I figure Im getting enough IP diversity between my sites.
PS: Im no expert. :P For more info do a google search for "ip address seo" or "class C IP address seo".
Thanks Toni. That's pretty much what I thought as well. I couldn't see any logic as to why a search engine would penalise a site for not having a dedicated IP (or indeed promote a site for having one), after all that has nothing to do with the important factors of content relevance and links/authority.
Ok I suppose it might indicate it's less likely to be spammy, and maybe if other sites were 100% equal in every respect it might be logical to give the one with the dedicated IP a tiny bit more trust. If anyone has tested this then it would be interesting to find out the results.
IIRC, Matt Cutts has stated before that Google *don't* penalise for shared IPs. A huge % of sites are hosted on shared hosting.
But my take is that Google will use any 'indicators of quality' to calculate trust for a site. So off the top of my heads, these might be:
- Dedicated IP address
- 10 year domain registrations
- No WHOIS privacy
- Premium generic domains
- etc
The reason that most of these would make good 'indicators of quality' is that they cost money. That means they are less likely to be used in large scale farming of spam sites.
I don't believe you are penalised for using a shared IP. But I do believe you can probably help your chances ranking thinking along the lines of hallmarks of trust.
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