Is your IP address a Google ranking factor?

The following old stories and suggestions from Brian Dean will make us believe that the IP address of your server will affect your ranking.

I mean, why not? If your server is all pornography, gambling or Viagra, it makes sense to blacklist the server, right?

But is this a myth?

One might imagine that if Google blacklisted servers, it would not help much, because SEO black hats can move their servers. But this will be a continuous game of Hungry Hippos.

This is the evidence we will share below, and this is why SEO professionals receive mixed information here. Below, we will discuss the truth behind the IP address as a ranking factor.

Disclaimer: IP address as a ranking factor

When it comes to IP addresses as a ranking factor, things in the SEO community can become cloudy. And it’s hard to know who to believe or what to believe.

The idea of ​​IP address as a ranking factor started with the term “bad community.”

Bad neighbor is based on the idea that if you use shared hosting, your IP address will be shared with all other sites on the same shared server.

Essentially, this may mean that you share servers with 5, 20, 100, 1,000, or even 20,000 other websites.

If you share a server with 499 other websites that talk about pornography, will this affect your ranking?

Should you get a dedicated IP address? Or cloud hosting?

Let us explore the evidence.

Evidence of IP address as a ranking factor

Is IP address a ranking factor?

Google’s Matt Cutts answered this IP address question Back to 2003.

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His response:

“I really don’t worry about that much.”

But in late May 2011, Kaspar Szymanski, Google’s search quality strategist, Tweet:

Author screenshot, July 2021

As you can imagine, this caused some confusion in the SEO community. In June 2011, Google published a blog post about protecting users from malware Hosted on bulk subdomain services.

Then in July 2011, Google Ban the entire subdomain, .co.cc, Because the host has an unusually high number of spam sites.

Author screenshot, July 2021

Finally, in 2018, when asked similar questions, John Mueller of Google Questions about IP addresses on Twitter.

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Mueller’s response Simple and straightforward:

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Therefore, we can guess that this is a potential ranking factor in the early 2010s. But this is not the case anymore.

Does server location affect SEO?

If your website is hosted in the United States but moved to a server in Brazil, will this affect your SEO?

Mueller answered the question On twitter,illustrate:

What if you move to a different location of the server? Usually not. Otherwise, we will get enough geolocation information, for example, from TLD and geolocation settings in Search Console.

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Will IP addresses affect link building?

Many SEO experts believe that server location and Different C-level IP addresses can improve ranking.

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To be honest, if you are considering issues related to link building strategies, then you are not doing link building correctly.

Do you want evidence?

Mueller answered the question Simply say “no” in Google Hangouts.

He added:

“This is not something you need to artificially buy IP address blocks to move around at will. Especially if you are on a CDN, then you will end up on IP blocks with other companies. Or, if you use shared hosting, then these things It will happen. This is not something you need to move artificially.”

Is shared IP, dedicated IP or cloud hosting more suitable for SEO?

It doesn’t matter whether you have a shared IP, dedicated IP or cloud hosting for SEO.

Mueller answered the question Dedicated IP and SEO On Twitter.

Author screenshot, July 2021

IP address as a ranking signal: our rating

Your IP address will not affect your ranking, at least not now.

The general consensus is that you’d better spend your time on website performance and content.

Featured image: Paul Bobita