am about to setup a new site on a shared server at a hosting company. Should I pay the extra 20.00 per year fee for a Unique IP address for my site? or does it not make a difference in improving my rankings in google?
How serious is the site? If it is an e-commerce site being down a day can mean a significant loss of revenue. If it is more a recreational site it may not mapper. Our serious sites all have a unique IP. Others on shared ip. The big worry is if anyone on shapred ip spams entire group hosted on IP may suffer. Shannon
That same c block IP rumor has circulated for over a year. Is there any proof it makes a difference. It probably is betterr to be safe than sorry. I just suspect it is somewhat like the current link churn debate. Shannon
my guess (note how everybody is guesstimating about this as nobody knows it, as usual) is that there is indeed an IP / "block" filter worked into the algo as it is easy to do and solves some issues with spam at the same time. I wouldnt worry about it too much unless your virtual server hosts spammer sites. I always ask hosting companies to give me sample IPs of their servers so I can run a reverse whois lookup. I tend to stay away from servers hosting spammer sites and even IPs with >100 domains on them, with SEO aspects only being one side of the coin as you can run into much bigger problems on very saturated hosts.
See http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=12846 for 'personal proof'. I've seen enough to be convinced.