Would sharing the same IP address with competitors in the same market hurt SEO?

[tjkirgin]

I work for the Chevy dealership in New York who is trying to rank against other Chevy dealerships in the same area. All the dealerships, including my client, are using the same Chevy endorsed CMS (Cobalt).  I just noticed that all of these competitors, including my client, are using the SAME IP address. Would it be beneficial to SEO if we were to ditch the Cobalt platform and choose another one that gave us a unique IP address? Have any of you run into this before? Any help would be appreciated.

[Dr-Pete]

Historically, I've seen two cases where it went wrong:

(1) On rare occasions, if one site on an IP was penalized, it could carry to other sites - not always, or even usually, but it's happened.

(2) If the sites are cross-linked, those links are more likely to be devalued. A link network on one IP isn't exactly a master stroke of black-hattery.

I suspect (but can't prove) that (1) is less common these days. The simple reality is that we're out of IPv4 address space, so shared IPs are much more common now than they were a few years ago. Google understands that. The purist in me still says get your own IP whenever possible, but the SEO repercussions in 2013  are probably small in most cases.

[SebastianCowie]

I'd agree with Marcus here. You may have the slightest negative influence on your results because of the IP address, but it's negligible. If there were low quality / spam / hacked sites on the same IP address you may find that is affecting your results.

Putting it another way, the time it would take to migrate from Cobalt to a different server you could invest in a bit of content or backlink building that would mitigate any negative effects that sharing the IP address may have.

You've probably already done this as well, but could you get in touch with the host and see if you can get a dedicated IP address?

[Marcus_Miller]

This has been bandied around for years and I don't think there has ever been a definite answer on this subject.

My take here is that if you were to set up several duplicate or very similar sites and then put them all on the exact same IP, then it is further evidence Google could use to hit you with some kind of penalty.

But, if you have a unique site, that is just topically related, I would like to think they have no issue with that and this is a small, small, tiny, like 1% issue that you can likely ignore.

I guess the question is, do all the sites do okay? If they got through the sh1tstorm that was 2012 then you likely will be okay for the long haul!

[William.Lau]

No. IP address does not affect SEO.

This would ruin the shared hosting plans since shared hosts usually have hundreds of sites under one IP/server.