Would sharing the same IP address with competitors in the same market hurt SEO?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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!
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Choosing an SEO agency
Is this the place to find an SEO agency?
Competitive Research | | Johnnyh
We are a car leasing company based in the UK and need an SEO agency to help us rank in a very competitive market. We have a relatively small budget of £2500 - £4000 per month. I appreciate this not a massive budget but that is where we are at. Any input would be much appreciated. Regards
John0 -
Which top 10 organic results are my competitors?
Hi all, This is a question about whether the top 10 ORGANIC Google results for a broad match is your competition, or whether it's the top 10 for a phrase match, or an exact match. I'm a newbie here but not a newbie to the world of SEO. I hope to be able answer just as many questions as I ask 🙂 QUESTION: If a customer comes to me and says, "hey, who's my (organic) competition for wedding present?" and I want to use Google to get the top 10 organic results, do I use a broad, phrase, or exact match? It seems many people think an exact match is the way to go but I think they were more referring to Adwords results / competition. I'm not trying to determine search volume for Adwords or even the search volume for organic results... I'm only interested in the top 10 competitors in the organic results. No one types in "wedding present" (with inverted commas" when doing a search in Google, so surely to see who ranks organically for wedding present I'd want to simply type in wedding present (no inverted commas, aka broad match). I understand all the concepts about how Google results cary whether you're logged in, etc, etc so I don't want to get distracted by that. And I know there's a bunch of tools we can use like the SEOMoz Keyword Analysis Tool. But I just want to know specifically what people would use (broad, phrase or exact) to look at the top 10 organic competitors are when doing a manual search in Google.
Competitive Research | | eatyourveggies1 -
Local SEO questions
Been getting into Local SEO a bit but still not completely up to speed on a few things. Would appreciate any input by experienced local SEO's to any parts of this: Ill ask my broader questions within the context of an example. I have a client who is a part of a keyword niche that isn't exactly what Google might consider "local". What i mean by this is that if you are a car accident lawyer and you type this into Google Google with spit out local results because it seems to know which terms are searched for with intent to find local results. This client makes essentially medical form software which I dont get any local results for when I search for their keywords. But they do have a local focus as in they have an address in a city which is a target market. The client told me they are looking to target other markets nationally as well down the road. However they don't have brick and mortar locations for these other cities so I am under the impression that it wouldn't be something we could target locally. This brings up a strange question in my mind though - if you need an address for a physical location for each city you want target...if you want to target the whole country locally, you would need to have a location in every city? Is there any way to target local focus without purchasing a new office in every city you target? Or can you target a state with one office etc or is Google bond things down to cities or understood regions? Does it sound like this company should even be doing local? The last part to this is whether or not there is any way (tool?) to figure out what local areas are searching for you keywords? Why doesn't Google allow us to use the Keyword Search Tool to see traffic etc for more than just a nation or the globe? What I would love to see is, which cities get the most traffic for X keyword term and have the lowest competition. Then it might justify having to buy some Regis office in a random location. I feel like this doesn't exist but maybe some of you have some ideas to direct me...
Competitive Research | | eastco0 -
What's the best way to discover my business and search competitors?
I am trying to figure out who the real competitors are for the domain that I have been recently handed. Other than the client's references, which I don't think are the real competition (they are his benchmarks), how do I go about discovering the true competition? What the simplest, most effective way to go about discovering my business and search competitors? Given that this is a web portal, aren't both of the latter the same?
Competitive Research | | amit20760 -
Content Ideas in a limited market
I've hit a road block of sorts and my mind is having trouble thinking out of the box. I'm in a relatively small niche with a roofing product called snow guards. I am struggling with ways to build links and content for my website at www.roofthings.com. I've used some forums, blogs, and directories. After going through my competitors link data, it seems that one of the biggest links they have that I don't is a DMOZ listing, but that can take awhile and I have submitted about 7 months ago. It also appears that a lot of their links I cannot get are coming from construction magazines they paid to be in. I don't have that kind of budget at this time and so I'm trying to compete via organic rankings. My biggest thing I am struggling with is how to gain more back links. My biggest competitor has over 40,000 links compared to my 2700. I'm somewhat new to SEO and am just looking for a couple suggestions. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | kadesmith0 -
Link analysis competitors
Am I missing something here or does SEO Moz only support three competitor sites to do comparisons against in each campaign? If not where do I add another website to the list to compare against? Thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | AdenBrands0 -
Crazy SEO question (maybe I'm missing something?)
OK - so one of our customers just called us and told us an interesting story: A local SEO company called her yesterday to try to sell their services to her. She's in the process of starting SEO services with us, so she told them she wasn't interested. The sales guy told her that they were better (without even asking who she was currently using) and asked her for a term that she'd like to rank higher for. She said she'd like to rank higher for "spray in bedliners northern ky" and he said "Gotcha, call you tomorrow" He called back just now and told her to look at Google. She's now ranking number one for that term. He didn't have access to her site, so he wasn't able to change anything on her site. He won't tell her what he did, and told her it was legitimate - but it seems to me that with only off-site tactics, it'd be nearly impossible to white-hat her site to number one overnight... Any ideas what he's doing? First of all, we want to be able to tell her what he's doing, because she's curious. More importantly, we want to be sure he's not doing anything black-hat that's going to hurt our client's site. Thanks for your help, Mozzers!
Competitive Research | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Why do some websites that have hardly any backlinks, poorly optimised get placed above sites that are doing all they can with SEO?
For example take these two websites. www.rfasecurity.co.uk is a site that Iam working on and have had some success with yet snifferdogs.org.uk seems to be poorly optimised with little backlinks and still gets place higher. is it due to the key word in the domian name? The key search word is sniffer dogs New at this so any help would be appreciated regards Dave
Competitive Research | | ThePod0