Fact or fiction? SEO implications of multiple sites on the same shared hosting.

[markowe]

You probably know the theory - having all your sites on the same shared hosting account (i.e. the same IP address usually) can have a negative effect on your sites in terms of SEO. There are a couple of issues that get mentioned:

1) The search engines figure there's a good chance all these sites belong to the same person and they give less or no weight to backlinks between these sites.

2) If some sites on the same hosting account/IP address are spammy, the other sites suffer for being in the same 'neighbourhood', or by the same person - guilt by association.

There may be other reasons quoted as well, but the slight problem is I have not found any actual proof of this anywhere. As is the case with so many SEO theories, this seems to be more about conspiracy theory/received wisdom/popular belief (circle as appropriate).

Now no. 1) I can sort of believe - actually, Google has lots of other ways of knowing which sites belong to the same person (AdSense, Webmaster Tools, Analytics - need I name more?)

But I sort of worry about no 2) because for one thing I don't know what other sites are hosted on the same IP address (is there a way to find out?), and for another thing, my main hosting account frankly has a LOT of my failed experiments, thin affiliate sites that got slapped, mashup/scraped content sites, you name it Just a little concerned that this does not do me any favours whenever I launch a new site on the same hosting.

Anyone actually seen any PROOF that this issue is a real one?

[DireStraits]

Originally Posted by markowe

You probably know the theory - having all your sites on the same shared hosting account (i.e. the same IP address usually) can have a negative effect on your sites in terms of SEO. There are a couple of issues that get mentioned:

1) The search engines figure there's a good chance all these sites belong to the same person and they give less or no weight to backlinks between these sites.

Probably most of the websites online reside on "shared-hosting" accounts, on shared IP's. The average website owner has no reason to utilise a VPS, dedicated server or a dedicated IP on a shared-hosting server.

So really, this is rubbish.

Google aren't stupid enough to believe that every site that ever resides on a single IP address is likely to belong to the same individual ... and even if they did, so what? So long as the content is of high-quality, and relevant to the keywords for which they rank in the SERPs, why would they care?

As for interlinking between sites you own that are hosted on a single server/IP, there may indeed be a degradation of backlink value, and I can just about see the logic in doing this, yes. But as for whether that's true, I don't know.

[markowe]

Originally Posted by DireStraits

Google aren't stupid enough to believe that every site that ever resides on a single IP address is likely to belong to the same individual ... and even if they did, so what? So long as the content is of high-quality, and relevant to the keywords for which they rank in the SERPs, why would they care?

I dunno - maybe it would be a flag - if some sites by an individual had been positively identified as 'crap' then it might be a ranking factor for that person's other sites - *shrug*. Not saying that's the case, just trying to figure out where the myth comes from and whether there is any truth to it.

[dburk]

Hi markowe,

Search engines do not index websites, they index individual pages. Usually all pages on a website have the same IP address and this does not harm the potential ranking of those pages in the SERP for their targeted term. Nor does it reduce the effectiveness of internal links on your relevancy scores.

Once you understand this fundamental concept of how search engines work you will realize how much nonsense it is to say uniqueness of backlink IPs has anything to do SE ranking. Please don't take this to mean that backlinks from a diverse network of pages isn't helpful, it is, it just has absolutely nothing to do with IP addresses and everything to do with the probability of a surfer to your page (Random Surfer Model). It's all about the flow of PageRank and IP addresses are not a part of the PageRank algorithm

The unique IP myth is pure Cargo cult science in my opinion.

[annaraewillis]

I agree it may not be as influential for some sites that have a strong, credible off-page strategy as well as unique/relevant/useful page content. that builds their brand in the online community.

Bad Neighborehood Sites - If a website is hosted with other sites that are considered bad neighborehood AND links in one fashion or another to multiple sites on that IP, it definitely can impact the site. Why wouldn't it, especially with the recent algo updates?

Link Building on the Same IP Network: Google is looking for natural links that provide a good UX and if a majority of links to a website are on the same IP address, assumptively controlled by the same webmaster, how is that natural? Unless the content is kick ass and the site has true purpose, Google's most recent updates support this theory 100%.

Don't get me wrong, it is possible to leverage sites on the same IP in terms of SEO, but the effort you would need to put into it to make it worthwhile could be better spend elsewhere, in my opinion...

[BradRich]

Man did this thread get dug up... Interesting tho.