SEO and Your Own IP Address

Danny Sullivan, one of the foremost authorities in the field of SEO and SEM, has been making waves recently with his departure from Incisive/SES/SEW. His post over at his personal blog, Daggle, has all the information you need.

As for what the news means for the industry at large, I’m definitely noticing more participation by Danny across forums and blogs. One comment of his I particularly liked. It’s about the general consensus about getting your own IP address - see Jim Boykin’s post on the topic.

From Danny:

So while I think it’s good advice for people to think about having their own IP, that just wasn’t a priority there.

When I think about it, there are two major reasons to do so:

1. To hide other domains you have from the competition. In my case, I’m not trying to keep anything (that) hidden.
2. To avoid being lumped in with bad sites on the same IP.

In terms of the second, it’s been a really long time since I’ve heard of someone innocently being wiped out because they were on a shared IP. Instead, you hear more about someone who was massively spamming and lost all their sites, since they were on the same IP. So again, not something worrying me in my case. Plus, I know that my site has a lot of high quality links pointing at it, which I feel confident will help the search engine do the right thing in knowing it’s not something that should get wiped out.

When in doubt, I’m with others, though. I’d get my own IP. In my case, it’s just not something that’s been that much of an issue.

Danny’s thoughts pretty much mirror my own - I’ve never understood getting your own IP for SEO purposes; unless, of course you’re engaging in spammy techniques or are setting up massive website networks. Far too many websites are hosted on shared IPs (including reputable, large sites) for Google and the like to penalize by such a dubious association.

Links, on the other hand…