Some people say that hosts using dynamic IPs are not as good for hosting due to having been "banned" by some engines.

Others say that's an old wives tale and that teh engines are smarter than that.

I'm inclined to believe the second but have no fact to go by. Thoughts?

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Jason in Dallas
Telecom Sales and Service Manager
RE license coming soon

Unique Ip numbers are not required - shared works fine. Many, many years ago unique ips were thought to be necessary and probably were but that changed when the rules for doling out ip numbers changed. It is now fiction and has been for a few years now.

Doug's right but I'm paranoid

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Rich
VTWS Real Estate websites are among the top lead
generating Real Estate Websites in markets across the United States for Realtors and Companies alike.
Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

A few years ago, some search engines were known to ban a whole Class C of IP's. That was a method (albeit an unfair shotgun approach that affected many innocents). It was a method of combatting spammers and other miscreants who gamed the search engine for top SERP placement.

A Class C block is a set of 256 IPs numbered continguously. Whenever you get a domain, it is assigned to an IP. Back in the day, a search engine would detect an abuser and bans that abuser's domain --- and sometimes the IP. The abuser might have another IP in that Class C block. The SE bans that, too. Then, right or wrong, the SE might ban the entire Class C, on the premise (not always right) that the abuser owns the entire Class C.

The problem would be if you have an IP within that Class C. If you're hosting from a web host, your domain is put in a server in which you may be in the midst of a spammer and its something that neither you nor your host can control. (One way of mitigating, was to insist that you are not placed in a server with an adult site because that industry has a high percentage of spammers.)

At the same time, as usage of the Internet expanded, more and more domains were being created and there was forecasted a shortage of IPs given the present IP numbering scheme. So then, more web hosts had new domains share a single IP on a server.

Like you said, SEs are supposed to be smart enough to not ban an innocent IP, and especially since now, there were domains that shared an IP, and sometimes with a banned domain.

The problem was that SEs were still known to inadvertently ban an entire server. Of course, the web hosts who used named servers (with shared IP) insisted that SEs won't do that -- understandably (business reasons).

So, the situation is supposed to be better today so that it's safe to use shared IPs; and that's the current common wisdom.

Some old school people who are paranoid, like me, still like to use unique IPs. Call it superstition, but back in the day we saw SEs say one thing and do another, and we saw SEs change the way they do things overnight, and reverting to the way they do things, or bringing back old algorithms (accidentally or not). It's probably just paranoia on my part in not trusting the SEs.

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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate
Rancho Palos Verdes Home Values

I agree. Why risk it when you don't have to. Google seems to have brought back a few things in their algorithm from the old days. Too much is at stake.



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Visit the most comprehensive Las Vegas Real Estate and Henderson Real Estate website online. Or look at pictures of my Parrot

Sure, there is a lot at stake but there comes a point where I want something more than heresay to justify extra expense to protect my investment.

There are a lot of reasons for the SEs to ignore IP addresses, and so far only conspiracy theories as to why they might blacklist some.

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Jason in Dallas
Telecom Sales and Service Manager
RE license coming soon

I can tell you that I have done my own testing over the years and found that having unique ip numbers make no difference. Others have tested and found the same.

As for search engines banning certain ip numbers - there was talk of that happening years ago before Google came along and that was always related to Alta Vista (then #1) and porn sites as I recall. If porn sites are considered bad, why are there a bazillion of them listed in search engines? (not that I look of course!).

Even if a search engine were to ban an IP for offensive porn the chances of it affecting a legitamate site are remote as porn sites and regular sites are not hosted on the same servers (read the rules of your web host).

Party on!

Actually some of the cheap hosts I'm looking into do allow porn. All other things being equal (when are they ever?) I'll steer clear of those just to be safe.

When I say "cheap" hosts I'm talking about the $5 a year kind of plans: Linux, PHP, MySQL, a gig or so of traffic and maybe 50Mb space with unlimited email on a shared platform with Fantastico scripts. That's really all I need for my micro niche brochure-style sites, although my main site will benefit from a beefier host.

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Jason in Dallas
Telecom Sales and Service Manager
RE license coming soon

Sorry for the off topic reply here but I just can't resist:



Maybe I'm losing my mind but I thought you were just out of college? I guess "back in the day" is a relative term when it comes to the Internet.

"Old school" and "back in the day" to me mean before the World Wide Web, like in the early Nineties or before when only geeks like me had email addresses, we had to know Unix to navigate the newsgroups, and we thought Kermit and Gopher were the answer to people wanting user friendly file searching over the Internet!

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Jason in Dallas
Telecom Sales and Service Manager
RE license coming soon

"Back in the day" was only mid to late 90's for me. I don't go as far back as when gopher was popular, but I knew about it. I was designing websites in pure HTML in Unix environment. I was playing around with web design coming fresh from the corporate client/server software world.

That was when we could game the search engines for instant SERP results. We could "work" Infoseek (since has died off), taking advantage of instantaneous submissions and push to #1 position in a matter of hours if not minutes by doing dozens of iterations. Google wasn't even around. We studied Excite and cracked the algorithm and gave our clients a lot of traffic overnight.

I made my money from starting up a company focusing on ecommerce design and SEO for clients. The game was watching the SEs, figuring out the algorithm changes and responding before anybody else. I hired a dozen web designers around the country, most who I never even met. It was a crazy world. It was a nice run but then dot bomb happened, and so here I am in real estate --- also a fun field, and a lucrative one at that! And in actual fact, it's like I never left the dot com world because a lot of my methods involve the Internet.

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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate
Rancho Palos Verdes Home Values

P.S., it's no extra expense for me to use unique IPs at all. I have a couple of dedicated servers and can run them the way I want, and each domain is assigned a unique IP when the DNS is defined. No biggie.

For most people already hosting in a name-based server, it would be an extra expense to do the alternative.

But, OK, like I said, I'm doing this because of old school superstitution. Everybody is probably just fine and the SEs will behave as they should on this issue. :-)

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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate
Rancho Palos Verdes Home Values

Do you have backlinks from one site to another within the same block of IPs? That would make me paranoid. Google recently applied for a patent for an algo to search for this very sort of thing which leads me to believe they might discredit such links or possibly penalize them.

It makes sense, but as always it's a real shame when the spammers ruin it for the rest of us who play fair.

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Jason in Dallas
Telecom Sales and Service Manager
RE license coming soon

Jason,

One should try to avoid creating even the appearance of a "link farm" today. Google and other SEs get sensitive about that.

A couple years ago, variations of link farms were the rage among SEO folks. Some of them worked fantastically back then. I remember one real estate site that unbelievably scored top positions in dozens and dozens of competitive keywords on the strength of a sophisticated link farm. He had quite a run of a couple years but it ended up getting penalized.

Shared IP's are very common these days and becuase of that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and all the other ones will NOT ever ban a full range of IP's or an IP for that matter.

All ban's are now done via Domain Name.

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Port Dover Real Estate - My Real Estate Website provider.

LoL
Hmm For google Do not crosslink a bunch of sites on the same ip block that worked until about feb of this year. Good thing you can find hosts for 4.00 a month.


But for other se's I haven't seen anything bad when it comes to crosslinking.

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Ahhh, Jade, I just now recollect about you from another thread (I think in another forum). You're the one who is #1 for "Las Vegas real estate" in google.

My hats off to you again for that exemplary performance in SEO! That is one of the most competitive keyphrases in real estate over the Internet.

The ultimate proof of an SEO's effectiveness is performance from a list of the most competitive keywords. Everybody can make the claim of being the best, but winners are pretty clear in the SEO world. Your methods and instincts are probably right on the money!

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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate
Rancho Palos Verdes Home Values

Interesting read here about Google's secrets based on US patent filed by Google. It does corroborate the notion that a bad IP can unduly penalize you, through no fault of your own, in Google.

Here's the link: http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/6-10-2005-71368.asp

Here's a direct quote from the article: Your hosts IP address. If you are on a shared server it's possible somebody else on that server is using dirty tactics or Spamming. If so, your site will suffer since you share the same IP.

FWIW

From a google employee on SEO:

1. Google does not penalize web sites that use pop-up ads.

2. Participation in Google's AdSense will not get your web site indexed more quickly.

3. New web sites take time to rank well in Google.

4. New sites take time to build up PageRank - even if you have tons of links pointing to it "immediately".

5. If you have your domain hosted on a shared server that also provides other domains... Google is smart enough to recognize virtual hosting.

6. Google doesn't start indexing web sites in alphabetical order.

7. Google is not limited to 32 bit indexing (4.3 billion pages) - Google will continue to grow.

8. Avoiding URLs with "id" parameter because "id=" usually marks a session. Rename domain.com/index.asp?id=something to some other param.

9. words separated by underscores ("_") or hyphens ("-") in URLs. Google will treat "keyword-phrase" as "keyword phrase" and "keyword_phrase" as "keywordphrase.

10. TLDs (Top level domains) .com, .net, .org, etc., will not rank better than any other regional domain.

11. Google can detect hidden text/link and even innovative use of hidden text/link e.g. - blue text link in a blue table but page white background is still detected.

12. Your site description is missing in index tends to indicate... site was down when Googlebot crawled.


So...it would appear that Google does not penalize based on IP. However, there is a good reason to have a Static IP...SPAM. If someone on your virtual host is spamming, your IP can be blacklisted by the spam services and, if you use your domain for your smtp server, your email will not be delivered.

Hope this helps!

Christina,

Thanks for your input. However, from actual experience as a search engine optimizer myself, I've seen Google penalize based on IP, historically. And they made the official statement they do not do so. I still do my own optimization but as a professional optimizer back in the day, part of the job is to separate fact from fiction (and it may appear strange but the search engines are often guilty of propagating fiction about their algorithms).

You make the statement in your last paragraph that if someone in a virtual host is spamming, the IP associated with the host can be blacklisted. That's true. Did you know that historically, entire class c's of ips can be banned also? What that means is that if you have a static ip residing on the same class c of a spammer, it can get penalized. In fact, slices of ips on a class c can be banned, if not the entire class c.