What We Know

We understand that some webmasters would be concerned with an IP address change of their website and the impact it might have on their search engine rankings. We have asked industry experts and have created the following article that will explain what we know about IP address and search engine strategies.

Generally speaking a dedicated IP address have couple of SEO benefits; however none of the claims have been either supported or rejected by SEs (Search Engines), and so far, it has been our experience that a change in IP address will not impact search engine ranking.

Benefits and Drawbacks

Crawling Behavior - Dedicated IP addresses have been noted to allow SE spiders to crawl website quicker than websites on shared IP. This has to do with a way SE bots parse the websites: bots begin with basic HTML 1.0. If it'll be able to parse the code right way - we're good; however, if not - the bot might move on to parse all other sites on the server with HTML 1.0 and move to 2.0, 3.0, etc only once it has attempted all websites on the server. Essentially, this can cause a delay with a bot spidering.

Class-C Address - Website links might be worth more if they are on a separate dedicated IP than on "Class-C/Shared IP". Even though Google confirmed that the impact is minimal - it does use IP-addresses to identify similar websites and potentially discount "link-value" if it is found that webmaster is involved in SPAM related cross-linking strategies.

Neighborhood - If the website is on the same ip address with Viagra, Pornography, or any other questionable content - SEs will inevitably consider this when assigning rankings to the website.

The Bottom Line

A dedicated IP-address does impact SEO in that there is a difference if the IP address is unique to a particular website, but what that IP address is, and if it is the same historical address, will make no difference in ranking.

More Info

If you have questions or concerns regarding your IP address and search engine rankings, please create a support ticket in your control panel. We will get you in touch with one of our search engine experts.