Different IPs and SEO. What do you think?

[RickDiculous]

I have seen a rather interesting thread on another forum about someone who built a 160 blog network on the same IP with sites linking to each other and had some pretty good SEO results.

Here is what he had to say about different IPs and SEO

Almost all of the blogs are hosted on the same IP, and they all link to each other.


Dedicated IP's for SEO is a ****ing MYTH...

...The SEO IP myth was created by hosting companies as a way to pad their pockets

What to think now? I'm paying $20 extra a month for 20 unique IPs for my blog network.

I read somewhere that if you're doing white hat SEO, no need for multiple IPs.

What do you guys think?

[deejay]

What do you guys think?

Pay another $20 per month for an extra 20 IPs.

[RickDiculous]

What do you guys think?

Pay another $20 per month for an extra 20 IPs.

That's not really helpful

[deejay]

That's not really helpful

It was meant to be, so I'll put it another and slightly longer way: the statement "The SEO IP myth was created by hosting companies as a way to pad their pockets" is bull.

It would be interesting to have more information about the 160 blog network that had "pretty good SEO results", even though all the blogs shared the same IP address. It's a fair bet that those "pretty good SEO results" didn't last for long.

In my experience, inbound links from sites with different IP addresses will have a positive effect on a site's position in the SERPs. So paying for more IP addresses or, better still, setting up hosting plans with providers in different geographical locations will assist your SEO efforts in the medium to long term.

[RickDiculous]

Here is the thread.

http://bbs.mediumpimpin.com/showthread.php?t=102903

[blogstargirl]

IMO I think google would eventually perceive link scheming. Plus if one site goes "toxic", toxicity could more easily spread to the other sites, if they are all inter-linked on a single IP. I doubt there is a hidden agenda by hosting companies to promote hosting sites on different IPs to improve SEO. But it's an interesting case. I'd check to see what his sites are doing a year from now.

[mBishop]

Having separate IP's for SEO benefit is in fact a Myth, one which WAS created by hosting companies. If you choose not to believe that, then you're spending money and depleting resources wastefully.

Google has stated numerous times that all things being equal, the IP address your site is on does not affect the ranking of your site. The only way your IP address can affect you is if a site that shares that IP gets blacklisted, thus blacklisting every other site on that same IP. Google would never use IP's as a SEO performance indicator to boost your ranking, since that would artificially inflate demand for IP's and cause the IPv4 namespace to be depleted much more rapidly than it already is. Within the next 6-9 months all unallocated IP space will be assigned to the respective regions and there will be no more "unassigned" space.

In a former life I was a web host, with thousands of customers. When the SEO IP myth came around, it was great (this was back in 02-03)... because we could increase our profit margins immensely by charging for something that didn't cost us a dime. IP's are given out for FREE to ISP's and Hosting companies, all that is required is a justification form to be signed. Having additional IP's didn't use any more resources, any more bandwidth, etc... but it brought significant "upsale" revenues from customers.

Yes, if you have hundreds of sites on 1 IP and they only link to themselves, that does not look natural, and could justify a google review, and cause a blacklisting. But if your sites are also linking to others out on the internet, and you're not doing anything fishy, then there is no need to have multiple IP's.


I'm not the only webmaster who isnt afraid to have more than a handful of sites on a single IP. Over at mediumpimpin, the MP team has over 400 blogs, many of which are on the same IP's. They all use the same google analytics account, they aren't hiding anything about their network trying to game the SE's.... and they just broke the $16,000/month revenue point.


So you can spend your time and energy worrying about google finding your footprint, having all of your sites on separate IP's... wasting money paying for extra IP's when you don't need it. That time, enery and money would be better spent building quality websites, and building traffic.

$20/mo on IP's would buy 2 more domains per month.


Oh, and I'll also toss this out there... what is more fishy, 100 websites on the same IP address that link to each other, as well as other sites out on the internet, or 100 websites each on their own IP, with only 1 website per IP address? Which one looks more natural, like the bulk of the internet which uses shared web hosts?

I beg the question... wouldn't 100 websites on 100 IP's (with just 1 site per IP) interlinked raise a flag to google? The only valid reason to have 1 site per IP is for SSL purposes, and if the sites don't have SSL, that screams "I'm a webmaster trying to game the SERPS with IP's!"

[RickDiculous]

Having separate IP's for SEO benefit is in fact a Myth, one which WAS created by hosting companies. If you choose not to believe that, then you're spending money and depleting resources wastefully.

Google has stated numerous times that all things being equal, the IP address your site is on does not affect the ranking of your site. The only way your IP address can affect you is if a site that shares that IP gets blacklisted, thus blacklisting every other site on that same IP. Google would never use IP's as a SEO performance indicator to boost your ranking, since that would artificially inflate demand for IP's and cause the IPv4 namespace to be depleted much more rapidly than it already is. Within the next 6-9 months all unallocated IP space will be assigned to the respective regions and there will be no more "unassigned" space.

In a former life I was a web host, with thousands of customers. When the SEO IP myth came around, it was great (this was back in 02-03)... because we could increase our profit margins immensely by charging for something that didn't cost us a dime. IP's are given out for FREE to ISP's and Hosting companies, all that is required is a justification form to be signed. Having additional IP's didn't use any more resources, any more bandwidth, etc... but it brought significant "upsale" revenues from customers.

Yes, if you have hundreds of sites on 1 IP and they only link to themselves, that does not look natural, and could justify a google review, and cause a blacklisting. But if your sites are also linking to others out on the internet, and you're not doing anything fishy, then there is no need to have multiple IP's.


I'm not the only webmaster who isnt afraid to have more than a handful of sites on a single IP. Over at mediumpimpin, the MP team has over 400 blogs, many of which are on the same IP's. They all use the same google analytics account, they aren't hiding anything about their network trying to game the SE's.... and they just broke the $16,000/month revenue point.


So you can spend your time and energy worrying about google finding your footprint, having all of your sites on separate IP's... wasting money paying for extra IP's when you don't need it. That time, enery and money would be better spent building quality websites, and building traffic.

$20/mo on IP's would buy 2 more domains per month.


Oh, and I'll also toss this out there... what is more fishy, 100 websites on the same IP address that link to each other, as well as other sites out on the internet, or 100 websites each on their own IP, with only 1 website per IP address? Which one looks more natural, like the bulk of the internet which uses shared web hosts?

I beg the question... wouldn't 100 websites on 100 IP's (with just 1 site per IP) interlinked raise a flag to google? The only valid reason to have 1 site per IP is for SSL purposes, and if the sites don't have SSL, that screams "I'm a webmaster trying to game the SERPS with IP's!"

Thanks for that very interesting post. Will concentrate my energy elsewhere then.

[inkognito]

I pay for ~10 IP address each mount cuz some "SEO Webmaster" don't want to do trades with me if sites are on the same IP.

There is no reason for buying additional IP addresses.

mBishop, good post.

[mBishop]

Also, interesting anecdote... A fairly large host (Servage, IIRC) had their shared hosting set up on a load balanced server setup, and had 40,000 customer domains on a single load-balanced IP.

[Relentless]

IPs can definitely matter (just like anything else) depending on the circumstances.

Most webmasters do not take all of the necessary steps to shield engines from knowing the ownership of their network domains. If they screw up anywhere along the line, the engines know who owns all of the sites and having them on different IPs becomes irrelevant for SEO. Even if you shield the ownership properly, getting a few trades on the same IP several weeks apart or getting a few trades on different IPs several weeks apart is going to be the same in the eyes of the engines.

However, if you have 100s of sites and you properly shield their ownership and you make trades with someone else who also has 100 of sites that are properly shielded... there is a HUGE difference between trading 50 or 75 links on the same IP and 50 or 75 links on different IPs. There is also a HUGE difference when trading links within your own network from one site to another (50 sites on the same IP linked to themselves are not as good as 50 sites on varied IPs linked to each other).

Also, IPs have a history. When you get a host you have no idea if the IPs they assign you *used to be* malware sites or sandboxed sites etc... Having your domains on many IPs makes it easier to see if you are being inadvertently put into what used to be a bad neighborhood.

From my point of view, as with everything else in SEO, if you hear people saying 'this never matters' or 'this is always critical' - 99% of the time they are wrong in some specific instances. SEO is about very specific details, but people too often speak about it in very broad generalities. Whether or not IPs matter depends completely on what you are trying to do, who you are doing it with and how you are going about it.

[vrocks]

The Google patent states that IPs ARE a big deal. However, Google's engine has been through years of tweaking and from what I am now seeing, IP's don't mean shit like they used to. More important is speed of the page load. The faster this happens the less bounce you have. Also unique content. Multiple page views on a site means a lower bounce rate. I am thinking about ditching my previous IP scheme where I literally had 3000 separate IP's on 40 different Class C's... I pay a whopping bill every month for this setup and as I check SERPs and see more and more competitors taking my spots I notice they often have all of their shit on the same IP. Same box. Same analytics. Same whois. Same nameserver. It is as though Google did a complete 180 and said, fine, we'll just stick with bounce rates and other data that can't be jacked with. The surfer either liked your content (whether it was a spam/pitch) or they didn't... If it was Good spam, fucking great. Surfers happy. Your site probably sold our ads anyway!

[Relentless]

It is as though Google did a complete 180 and said, fine, we'll just stick with bounce rates and other data that can't be jacked with. The surfer either liked your content (whether it was a spam/pitch) or they didn't... If it was Good spam, fucking great. Surfers happy. Your site probably sold our ads anyway!

When trading a few links from your network to another I am confident IPs are irrelevant.

If you are interlinking your own sites within your own network, different IPs matter a lot.

If you are trading dozens or hundreds of site links between two networks and they are all on the same two IPs it matters as well.

Like anything else, it's not a cut and dry yes or no answer.

[AmateurFlix]

I suspect that the major SE's algorithms have changed to accomodate recommendations from social networking sites.

The idea behind counting distinct sites/IP's as distinct "votes" was that doing so would make it more likely that each vote was coming from a different webmaster. However now with social networking sites having an effect on the SERPs, that is no longer the case; many thousands of individuals might be placing a link/vote from the very same domain/ip.

edit: this is just my own speculation.