Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?

[grapevinemktg]

We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?

[anthonytjm]

At first I was leaning to disagree. But couldn't find anything to back it up. I know some seo tools have ip address checkers to make sure your in a good ip neighborhood and block. I thought this would fall in the same line as what was originally asked.

"A clean IP address. You might think your site is squeaky clean, but did you know your IP address has a dirty secret? That’s right. Unbeknownst to you, your neighbor is into some very shady things. Check to see if you’re in a bad IP neighborhood by running an IP checker like MXToolbox.com."

The entire post can be found here: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/04/the-seo-bucket-list-3-things-to-do-before-your-site-dies/

So because of these tools checking your ip block I was always under assumption that a shady site on a server could in fact have some impact on your rankings. However I am hard pressed to find any evidence to support this.

Heres another post from above reference:
"About 3% of all web sites "own" a private ip number, with the remainder being on virtual, or name-based, servers. Although only 3% are dedicated ip's, we have seen that in many instances well over 90% of the top-50 results in the search engines are sites having dedicated ip numbers. This was so strange that we have repeatedly validated these findings, and have found that switching a site from a virtual ip to a dedicated ip number alone has caused significant ranking increases. Of course, the web is so dynamic that this could be coincidence, but we do not think so.

Likewise, we have found that there are "dirty" ip c-blocks, ranges of ip numbers that have been tarnished by spammers and left to be reassigned to unsuspecting sites. If your site is in the range of the spammers ip, then you are equally penalized. We have likewise found instances where simply moving a site has caused the ranking to improve."

Im glad I came across this post. Learn something new everyday. Did I misunderstand the statement on the above mentioned article or is this perhaps an outdated theory?

Thanks in any event for teaching an old dog something new.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Your site should not be affected by other sites hosted by the same provider.  Think about huge nationwide hosting sites like GoDaddy - if sharing hosting with websites with questionable content was a problem, a LOT of websites would have a problem!

[Highland]

Better still, get your own virtual dedicated server and don't share anything except hardware resources

[KevinBudzynski]

I agree with Highland, but if this is a major site, just pay the extra few dollars to get a dedicated ip address (just in case).

[Highland]

What you're talking about would be an IP ban or filter. I've never had anyone prove such a thing exists. At worst, someone hacks a server that is shared hosting dozens of sites and does something to directly attack Google. In that case, I would assume Google would ban the IP from incoming traffic but not from outgoing (like a bot).

Google ranks domains, not IPs. So even if you're shared hosting on the same IP as an adult site, Google won't see your site as related to theirs unless you LINK to them. So your SEO and their SEO are like ships passing in the night, sharing an ocean and nothing else.