IP based domain names VS. virtual hosting accounts Options

I recently had the opportunity to attend an Association of Internet Professonals monthly event down in Orange County, CA. The topic of the evening was basically online marketing, with several representatives from SE's (Google, Inktomi, Overture, Yahoo!) some Ad agencies, and a couple of SEO types (submitexpress.com was one).

The question I posed to several of the different parties and was basically unable to get a reasonably worded answer that felt "authoritative" was this,

"Is there a difference to the SE's between a site that is hosted on a web server with its owned assigned IP address, and one that may be on a host running a virtural hosting situation (where there may be many domain names associated with a single IP address)?"

I have my thoughts, and after getting lots of info and insight around these parts, I am still not completely sure as to whether this might be an issue worth being concerned about. Obviously, if we are attempting to do work for a client/ourselves, and busting our humps to get good SERP results, then at least having knowledge to this issue could be important in figuring out why your efforts may or may not be working.

Thanks for the insight.

Hi James, I don't think I've welcomed you to the forums...so welcome.

Interesting issue you've bought up. I'll look forward to hearing what some of our gurus have to say.

\"Is there a difference to the SE's between a site that is hosted on a web server with its owned assigned IP address, and one that may be on a host running a virtural hosting situation (where there may be many domain names associated with a single IP address)?\"

There is a difference, Jim, and its simply that there are less problems and less worries with ownned assigned IP addresses.

Many thousands of sites use virtual hosting without a problem, then suddenly, one webmaster (or even someone they hire) gets the IP banned through over-aggressive search engine spamming and the whole setup becomes a nightmare.

There can also be mix-ups (I remember several such with Google in particular) where one site's listing somehow goes to another sites page. I think there are dozens of entire discussions about that on Webmaster World alone.

Separate IP numbers are certainly preferable, but even there, beware of the history that the IP number may have if you are not the first owner. I remember a guy from a couple of years back who 'inherited' an IP block on Altavista when he got a dedicated IP because its previous owner had been an adult site with millions of doorway pages, etc.

Thanks for your reply Ammon. Well written, easy to understand and it makes a damn lot of sense. :wink:

In reality, I don't think the majority of webmasters have much to fear from virtual hosting. Just be sure to pick a fairly reputable provider, probably one who doesn't host free-for-all accounts.

Hi Sophie. Thanks. And no, you hadn't issiued me a welcome and I was getting concerned that I would never get the yellow m&M welcome!

So BK, I can definitely see the challenges that might be associated with the banning of an IP. I'll assume this is how the SE's deal with someone they have deemed has broken their rules? Do they do this as opposed to simply removing the domain name/web pages from their index?

I have heard of similar events where in effect the URL input into the browsers address bar has taken the visitor to another site on that virtual block (similar to a user clicking on a link within the SERP). My research and experiences here have shown though, that the challenge was on the side of the web host and not the SE. Kind of makes sense if you think about the process of that request being resolved to the actual web page display. Nothing is happening on the side of the SE other than their being a request to DNS that then goes to the web host to resolve to the proper directories on their servers.

Your post prompts an interesting thought to me that I'll share. Not sure how you all do real estate transactions over there (or where the reader of this is!) but my guess is that it is similar to us. One of the activities that new property owners here "should" invest in is title insurance, where a fee is paid to a company that will produce an investigative report and then insure the results to the prospective buyer that there are no lingering leins, fees, or other such liabilities.

Seems like there could be an opportunity here for a similar service for an "IP's History Insurance". The question then is how/where would one find out whether or not there are bans or other encumbrances placed upon an IP number. Do the various SE's make that information public? Might one with as much knowledge as yourself be able to share with the rest of us :?:

If so, thanks in advance, if not then maybe a that would be safe guarded by this poster for all times?

Back to the original spirit of my post, however. From a technical perspective, do the the SE bots crawl by IP number or domain name? I would think the answer to this would get me closer to understanding which would be a better scenario in relation to SEO. If it is via IP (which would be my guess) do you know how the SE crawls the virtual sites that are all under one IP? Do they find the IP# that has any number of sites hosted under it and then simply crawl what they find there and proceed to index their findings? From this perspective does it really make a difference to those of us attempting to get our clients sites/our sites better rankings which type of hosting we have: virtual or IP?

Thanks.

be sure to pick a fairly reputable provider, probably one who doesn't host free-for-all accounts.

Hey, Peter. By "free-for-all" you mean sites that could post any type of content, or do you mean site owners that would resort to any number of unscrupulous activites that would get themselves (their IP) banned. Or maybe you mean both!

Thanks.

I meant free hosting (with banner ad supported space etc) Too often littered with rubbish content, in all respects.

A bit of an interview with Craig Silverstein of Google:

5) Google and IP address.
by Anonymous Coward  

Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don't come from a unique ip address. Please don't just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation.  

Craig:

I can't just deny it? What are my other choices? [] Actually, 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. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception--thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!

Read the entire interview here:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/...39.shtml?tid=95

Jill

Good stuff Jill thanks!

For what it's worth, I remember reading some research on this carried out by Bruce Clay.
He found that everything else equal, dedicated IPs ranked higher.
Not many supported his findings though.

BK covered all the main stuff Soooo succinctly that I don't think there is any room for me to add anything

Hold on...on a fixed ip you can run ICQ style chat!

Glyn


(ps) BK's also points out that 1 rogue on your Netblock that could colour any SEO work. This is true. But consider that just about every ISP is now running dynamically assigned IP's for their basic business accounts so, in the event of a block there are alot of customers getting banned.

So BK, I can definitely see the challenges that might be associated with the banning of an IP. I'll assume this is how the SE's deal with someone they have deemed has broken their rules? Do they do this as opposed to simply removing the domain name/web pages from their index?

It varies, Jim, and I think one of the variances will be based upon the reason for the ban. If they are banning a site for a small transgression, localised to a particular domain, then they may simply settle for banning the domain name.

However, if they are banning someone for using shadow domains, or for repeat offences, I think the chance of an IP ban will increase dramatically.

AV used to do all bans at the IP level, specifically to target the hosts. Indeed, AV were quite prepared to ban an entire C block of IP numbers if the hosting company associated with them were a little too easy for spammers to use. Hypermart was entirely banned from spidering by AV for exactly that reason.

:grab:

OUCH! Guess I better change my evil ways. J/K. Good stuff. Thanks for the info, all.

There can be other problems associated with hosting that should be addressed, since many virtual hosts are simply not set up the way they should be.
Two of my subdomains were dropped from Google when my web host decided to save a few bucks and move all his customers from dedicted IP addresses to virtual hosting.

Under the old dedicated IP address all the search engines had listed my domain as http://www. mysubdomain.mydomain.com but under the new hosting setup the URL would not resolve unless the www. was removed. So all the nice high ranking SERPs would return a 404 error.as did Wisenuts sneak-a-peek feature.

Add to that the fact that the new virtual IP addresss assigned was blacklisted by almost every spam list in existence, and you have the makings of a nightmare.

BTW Bruce Clay has a very nice free tool (you do have to sign up for it) to check our how your server is responding to various calls.

I solved this problem by moving to a new host who uses dedicated IP addresses, has great support and costs less than the old host. Google promptly spidered my site, bave me back some of my PR and I fully expect to be back to where I was before my old host torpedoed me in the next update.

BTW Bruce Clay has a very nice free tool (you do have to sign up for it) to check our how your server is responding to various calls.

Good stuff. Thanks. Any information on where to find Mr. Clay's tool? Thanks.

Hi Jim:
go to Bruceclay.com, sign up for the free trial of their SEO toolset (they do make you jump through a couple of hoops) and when you are signed up, go to your free tools section and the servier verification tool.

Be warned that this is a very strict tool and will almost always find some problems on virtual hosted sites.

Hey, Mel.

Thanks for that link. Some really good stuff for a learning SEO! I am especially happy to have found the Search Engine Relationship Chart. Really good info to know.

Thanks again, Mel.

Glad you found it of use Jim.

In these days of shifting Search engine alliances, a regularly updated chart like this is very useful, even if Googe is driving essentially all the traffic.

Speaking of IP addresses, I recently ran across this bit on IP addresses to feature in my Search Engine Bytes portion of my site;

Netfactual.com reports that although there are about 19.5 million active websites, there are only about 3.2 million IP addresses in use, with the largest number of domains using one IP address a staggering 1,760,054!