I am looking at moving all my sites from shared hosting onto a virtual dedicated server. Can anyone advise whether this will help SEO? I understand that shared hosting is not and dedicated is the best, but will a VDS give me a half way boost? LR
SEO? Indirectly i guess. Well you will have more stable server, so spiders won't have any "server down" when crawling. Class C and IP thinggy is not changing if you already have a separate IP with the shared hosting, which is much cheaper than moving to VPS. Server will load faster thus make you visitors happier. That's all I guess. So it's not a direct "impact". Half way boost in SEO? I don't think so.
Well, you said you will move your "sites"... If you have many links between your sites, and you only have one IP address that will be shared for all your websites on the same server, links from site to site wont weight so much as if they would be on different IP's... So, from this point of view you can say that it will affect you...
If it's moving into another IP there will be only 2 IPs. Cross linking between 2 IPs... That's not so big.
I think these guys hit the nail on the head. Dedicated IPs and load times will be your only benefit. I only do dedicated hosting on my sites, but only because managing the server myself is so much better then dealing with crappy support teams