There is an ongoing argument in the SEO world about whether or not having a dedicated IP address for your website helps your SEO and PageRanks.

Those that say it has no relevance base their argument on the theory that search engines have “evolved” above the fact and don’t take into consideration whether or not a website has a private IP address or not.

A favorite quotes these same people use comes from Craig Silverstein, the Ex-Director of Technology at Google, who in 2003 said, “Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases.”

Again, in 2006, Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, wrote in a blog post that “there is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP).”

In their defense, Google did clamp down on website owners who tried to create multiple websites with almost the same content but using different IP addresses to fool search engines into thinking they were dealing with separate and unrelated sites. In reality, the site owners were trying to flood the engines with their [same] products and services.

This, of course, was cheating – pure and simple; and Google did catch on, and put an end, to the practice.

Ok; so right about now, you’re probably thinking, “Well; that settles it, then!”

Well, we say: “Not so fast!”

Just because Google (and the other leading search engines) said a dedicated IP address doesn’t matter directly doesn’t mean it won’t help your website’s SEO and PageRank indirectly.

Below are a few points we are sure you would like to know about a private IP address and how it can help you with your SEO:

Speed and Stability:

As any business website owner would know, a high amount of traffic is a good thing. It is a sign that your business is growing.

But, if you want your website to handle this large amount of traffic, you will need to have a dedicated IP address. That way, you will increase – or at the very least, maintain – your current website speed while at the same time handling the large number of visitors without crashing your site.

It is a known fact that Google favors websites with fast loading times and good up time records. Speed and uptime are critical factors that are the results of a dedicated IP address.

SSL Certificates:

Any business looking to handle online financial transactions need to make sure their clients’ credit/debit card and personal information are kept safe and secure. The best way to do so is by ensuring the site has an SSL certificate. And in order to have the certificate, it is a requirement that the site have its own, dedicated, IP address.

With a secure website, businesses build consumer confidence which results in more traffic. Also, the longer a website is protected from data theft and hacking, the longer it stays online – thus increasing the ranking of the website due to its reliability and, again, up time.

Online Reputation:

People visit websites that have a good online reputation and avoid those that they don’t think are safe or have a bad reputation – just like they would prefer to avoid a brick-and-mortar store in the shady part of town.

Your website too, could be located in such a “shady neighborhood” if it is hosted on a server that also caters to online gambling, pornography, prescription-free medication sales, spam and any other illegal activities.

If you share the same IP address as these sites – which you will, if your hosting is a shared one – then, your site too will be blacklisted or, at the very least, handled with suspicion by search engines and antivirus and antimalware software.

And once your reputation takes a hit, your visitor numbers will take a dive. This will certainly be noticed by the search engines that will take note of the fact that no one wants to visit your site or link to it.

Once a website’s reputation has taken a hit – it is pretty difficult to earn it back or mend it.

CONCLUSION

When we add all the main advantages we get from the use of a dedicated IP address we get:

• It helps increase the speed of a website.
• It contributes to the stability of a website.
• It contributes to the safety and trust of the site’s visitors.
• It helps with the up time of a website.
• It helps with the reputation of the site (and the business that owns it), which in turn helps in pushing up the number of visitors.

Therefore, since all these advantages contribute to pushing-up a website’s PageRank, we can safely conclude that having your own IP address does in fact, help with your SEO.