If you are serious in achieving high search engine rankings in any industry… YOU NEED YOUR OWN DEDICATED IP ADDRESS.
I have seen this time and time again, sites disappearing in the search engines for no other reason then for being on a shared ip address. Shared hosting companies can have hundreds, even thousands of websites on a single ip address, and if one of those sites is participating in spamming the Internet, IT IS THE IP ADDRESS THAT IS PENALIZED. And if you are on this ip address you will suffer too.
If you find that your search engines rankings suddenly drop dramatically, the first thing to be looked at is if you are on a shared ip address. It usally costs an extra $3-10 a month for your own ip address. Once you move your website to a dedicated ip address… you should see your rankings recover within 1-4 weeks.
- The most common reason an ip address will get banned/penalized is sending out unsolicited spam e-mail.
To recap… if you want to rank well in the search engines:
- Do not host your site on a free website hosting platform (this type of hosting can have thousands of sites on a single ip address).
- If you do pay for hosting… pay the extra $3-10 a month for your own dedicated ip address.
- If your ranking suddenly drop significantly… get your own dedicated ip address as the first plan of action.
Others will argue the importance of having a dedicated ip address, and if a penalty is even possible. All I can say is that I have seen this on 3 separate occasions, and I have been able to bring all the sites back by getting the sites their own dedicated ip’s.
Hope this imformation will help others…
Brian
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Great tip Brian, I’m looking up Hostgator costs right now!
Its also good to protect yourself – say you run a number of websites and want to keep them secret from the competition, a dedicated IP could be useful their too.
Do you use dedicated IP’s for all your projects? Have you found much difference in the rankings when you start out with a dedicated IP?
Hi Andrew… I use dedicated ip addresses for all my sites. It is much safter from an seo standpoint to have a dedicated ip address. I have personally seen huge ranking increases when switching to a dedicated ip address from a shared hosting account. I think most shared hosting ip addresses carry some measurable penalty. It is just a precaution against losing your rankings and an ensurance that you will rank where you are supposed to rank. You can even put ALL YOUR SITES on your own dedictated ip address. But you never want to share an ip address with strangers.
Thanks for clarifying Brian.
I agree – if you can afford it, a dedicated IP is vital, all it takes is one or two ‘bad’ sites on the shared hosting account to have an effect on your site. I don’t think people understand shared hosting means hundreds of other sites!
Interesting article. If your own sites are linking to each other in some way then it’s going to be best to keep them all on different servers/IPs
Matt Cutts suggests that if you only have a small number of sites its fine, its just when you get loads of them you have to be more aware..