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Dedicated IP addresses and SEO

Before going any further, a big thanks need to go out to Craig Silverstein and Matt Curtis for the excellent information they have provided regarding dedicated IP addresses and SEO!

Revealing a myth

There has been a lot of confusion regarding this SEO practice since always, that’s why I’ll put all the pieces together in this article in an attempt to unmask the myth once for all :)

Back in 2003, most of us (I include myself until a few years ago) missed Craig Silverstein (Director of Technology at Google) statement in an open discussion regarding the importance of dedicated IPs over SEO that some webmaster had at that time:

Question:

“Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don’t come from a unique ip address. Please don’t just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation.”

Craig’s reply:

“Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP address. If your ISP does a virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases”

Moreover, this was reinforced back in 2006 when Matt Cutts, (head of Google’s webspam) stated the following at his personal blog:

“There is no pageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP)”

Also, you can take a look at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and you’ll notice that dedicated IP addresses aren’t to be found on that list.

Why wouId I need dedicated IP then?

There are cases when a dedicated IP is mandatory, for instance, if you are planning to install an SSL certificate in your e-commerce website to ensure that all your customer’s data is safe during transactions.

Beyond the e-commerce example, there are not really that many reasons your website may need a dedicated IP, however, there are still very specific cases that applies as valid ARIN justification.

If you have questions whether if your websites needs it or not, you can submit a support ticket anytime! one of our support staff will be glad to review your case.

In conclusion

Based on all of this information directly from Google and some of their heads, we can affirm that a dedicated IP address won’t improve your SEO rankings, thus, it won’t be considered as a valid ARIN justification.