Under the Digital Cloud

I’d like to take a moment to address a very common misconception that is very old, but still around today.  Essentially, the myth is that a site with a dedicated IP address will do better than one with a shared IP address with other site in search engine result pages (SERPs) because search engines associate sites by IP address and not by domain name.

Well, this post is about busting this myth, although a bit of history first explains why it used to be true.

I remember (unfortunately) the days before virtual hosting, where every web site had its own server.  In fact, the www prefix before most URL’s now (i.e. www.ocssolutions.com) comes from the fact that sites used to have a server handle the website, www, and then have other servers that handled things like FTP, E-mail, etc.  The reason for this was twofold – primarily the software and configuration techniques weren’t around to virtualize these things, but the speed of computers at that time meant that a web server could easily overload a mail or FTP server, thus the need to separate them into different physical machines.

This was quite some time ago.  About 10 years ago, search engines became smarter as to how sites were hosted, because IP addresses were running short and hosting companies out of necessity and out of providing a reasonably priced shared hosting package started hosting multiple sites on the same IP using Apache’s virtual hosting technology.

When I say search engines, I mean Google primarily, because they have by far the largest market share.  That said, other search engines like Yahoo, Bing (previously known as Live, then MSN search before that), and Teoma (powering Ask, among others), refer to sites by domain name and not IP address as well.

In a Slashdot interview with Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein, Craig states:

“Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!”

That’s about as authoritative as it gets on the subject, directly from a Google management-level employee.

The misconfiguration of virtual hosting that Craig is referring to is very rare nowadays, because technologies like cPanel, Webmin, and others prevent this sort of misconfiguration in most cases.  Sites hosted by OCS Solutions are configured correctly, and we have many sites hosted on our shared hosting that enjoy high search engine rankings and good SERP coverage.

So why does this myth persist?  Well, in a subject as un-documented as SEO, it’s an easy place for myths like this to flourish and persist.  Even though Google has published guidelines on SEO and website content, people still insist that doing certain things that haven’t been proven or were once true but aren’t help.  It’s easy to see how this still goes on, but myths like this are fortunately becoming less popular.

I still see this myth from time to time pop up still though, and I wanted to make a post for everyone on the subject.  Don’t just take my word on this though, examine the interviews and documentation that Google provides on the subject.  Check out the long thread on SEO Watch Forums and read it throughly, not just the first few replies.

There’s only one situation where sharing your site with others would potentially (and that’s potentially with strong emphasis) harm your rankings, and that would be if there were many sites on that IP that performed unethical techniques like cloaking, link farming, and other nefarious tactics.  You don’t have to worry about that with our hosting though, because we routinely check for this.  Hosting a site at OCS Solutions (along with many other web hosts) that engages in deceptive SEO tactics is not allowed and actually against our TOS.  We enforce this because we want to ensure you have the best possible environment to succeed without being potentially harmed by anyone else on the same machine.

I hope this helps clear this issue up.  If you have any questions about this topic, please feel free to contact us, or leave a comment.  Like I said, don’t take my word on the subject, do some independent research on it if you’re concerned.  When searching though, try to find more recent articles and posts over older ones, and stick to more authoritative sources, such as Google themselves, or top SEO experts that use approved and above-board positioning techniques.