I heard somewhere that dedicated IP can get you higher ranks in Google... is it really true?? Anybody having any experience with this??
I've had sites rank #1 for competitive keywords without being on a dedicated IP. I haven't seen any difference for my sites between shared hosting or a dedicated server with it's own IP. So in my opinion it isn't essential.
I think that, dedicated IP cannot directly influence a site ranking. This however can affect the loading time for a site especially is the site has lot of traffic. If the load time is decreased via using a dedicated IP then this may have a very small impact on the ranking.