I've read somewhere that Google looks into the IP address of a server and uses that information as part of the ranking calculation. If the IP address is linked to the domain name as in the case of a dedicated server, does that improve the pages ranking? Also is the server speed taken into account when ranking sites? Ie. Do faster sites appear higher in the results than slow sites?
Good question! Wondering myself. And in addition of it matters if you host more than 1 website on a shared IP. For example I am hosting 12 websites on 1 deluxe hosting account at godaddy. Does it influence my SERPS?
Simple answer is NO dedicated server rank same as shared hosted Check out my 9 SEO Popular MYth # 6 but if you are using C class IP to do interlink .. then it might be harmful the answer for this is also NO .. unless your site have too much downtime
unless the shared server has a lot of downtime there will be no SEO advantage/disadvantage, however colocation (where the server is hosted) will play a part in SERPs
Shared hosting is just the same as a dedicated server except with shared, there is 10-50 people using the one instead of having the whole thing to yourself.
No, there is no effect. Google will use the IP address when checking the source of inbound links (for countering spam), but it won't improve your rankings. It's a quality assurance measure, nothing more.
I've wondered about this in the past, 2 or 3 times, when the topic comes up. I wonder about it everytime its mentioned. This topic has always got mixed opinions and answers. Maybe I should test a domain or two and find out. Some say yes, some say no... Btw... If I go to http://64.233.183.104, I get Google. If I do the same with one of my "shared" domain ip's, I get nothing. I was told on a shared ip its, 123.123.123.123/useraccountname/. but I cant seem to get it to work. How is a domain found on a shared ip if we have 50 users on the same ip. Is it handled bt the DNS, or is it handled by the hosting account??? Not hijacking this thread or anything, just trying to place some information or facts to the theory???
It's http://0.123.456.789/~useraccountname/ actually (the 0.123.456.789 "IP" is fake, obviously, being used only as an example - your real IP address would be there instead, and this note is being written for the benefit of others who will read this in the future) - note the tilde before "useraccountname"
definately effects link value - different sites on the same class c ip are consider by G to be connected, and their link juice is not as strong when linking to each other. I don't know about shared hosting, but it certainly sounds like something G can easily know, and take into account. A site with it's own server sounds like something more authoratative to me, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's taken into account, though probably not given a lot of weight.
By their very nature (assuming they're just sitting on the same server and not linking to each other), no they're not (otherwise there would be no point in shared hosting), and second, their "link juice" wouldn't be weakened if the sites were connected to each other - they'd all be banned for participating in a link scheme. As I said earlier (in a previous post), Google doesn't care. It'll only use them as an anti-spam quality control measure - to make sure that sites are not constantly inter-linking to each other. Also don't forget that Google is a registrar, so even if you had multiple Web sites with multiple Class C IP addresses, if the administrative contact and registrar information on all the domain names point back to you, you'll still get all those sites banned if you inter-link them together. And if you think that registering the domain names under ficticious names will get around that, well, have fun when the domain names get taken away because they were registered fraudulently.