Google Inside

There have been long debates about whether virtual hosts or dedicated IPs are the same, better, different, or whatever you want to call it.

Barry’s gathered some more evidence that it doesn’t matter. Do whatever you want to do. Google, in this case, will treat any outbound link as the same.

Matt Cutts touched on this subject over a year ago.

“I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.”

More recently, another affirmation coming from Google Groups.

“Lots of sites are hosted on shared IPs. If this had a negative effect on ranking, it would harm most of the sites on the web–and that’s not good for small webmasters or for our users. So, understandably, sharing an IP should not have an effect your ability to rank.”

Which does indeed make sense.

I still like to give each* domain their own IP address so I can access them via IP if I need to.

However, on the flip side of these affirmations, Lisa Barone of Bruce Clay feels differently.

Does it matter which one you choose?

Yes! We recommend that any site serious about their rankings spend the money (it’s only a few extra bucks a month) to be on a dedicated IP.

It’s important for a few reasons. First, we’re pretty sure it plays at least a small part in the search engine’s algorithms. The engines will use reverse lookup to determine what kind of IP you’re on. If you think they don’t care, consider this: It’s been said that about 3 percent of all Web sites have dedicated IPs, with the other 97 percent resting on shared IPs. Research was then conducted analyzing the top 50 results for certain queries in the various search engines. The research found that 90 percent of the top-50 results were using dedicated IP numbers.

If you’re interested in finding out more details about a website’s IP address or hosting situation, Netcraft is an amazing tool.