Should I get a unique IP?
-
I have a couple sites hosted in a VPS that share the same IP.
Should I assign each site a unique IP? Would Google affect my rankings for a sudden IP change?
-
I think that now a days, with many sites using reverse proxies (such as CloudFlare) Google has stopped looking at the IPs as it is no longer a factor to rank sites.
Jeff's point on the e-mail problem is right, however, you can simply host your email on a third party IP, like Google Apps, and never get blocked. Something that even dedicated IPs get the punch.
I have a few dedicated servers, some of them with multiple IP addresses and I found myself trying to clean new IP addresses that just were to new or "abused" by previous owners.
Switching hosting provider, however, while changing the IP address may increase/decrease rankings not because of the IP but most likely because of the site speed, which IS something that Google considers to rank sites.
-
Jeff's answer is very good.
I just wanted to add that if your sites link to one another, I would highly recommend having separate IPs and even separate hosting accounts if possible. Part of Google's patent on rankings are referring domains and the IPs in which those domains are on. I've personally seen where moving a domain that I own to a different host with a different IP dramatically increased each of the sites rankings. (this may be just correlation and not necessarily causation but it's worked for other people I've worked with too)
-
Ricardo -
While Google usually doesn't have a problem indexing sites with shared IPs, I'd highly recommend each site have it's own IP address.
While it's fine if you're hosting multiple sites on a VPS that share an IP address, long term, you need to worry about things like email blacklisting (if one site starts send out spam) or other issues, too.
I don't think that you'll see any negative implications for rankings if you change the IP address; I'd perhaps set the TTLs in your DNS zone file for the domain down as low as it can go (i.e. 3600 seconds or 1,800 seconds) to prevent users from not seeing the site if they have the older IP address cached on their computer.
Hope this helps...
- Jeff
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
-
IP address geolocation
I would classify our site as large (www.covers.com), with our primary target being traffic within the US (about 70%) but I have a feeling we are limited by our IP being located within Canada. I have changed all the targeting to the US in WMT, but could undertake a project to virtually 'move' the site to a US IP, if there would be benefit. I have found articles coming down on both sides of the issue. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | evansluke1 -
How To Get Rid Of Duplicate Title Tages
Hey everyone, I have a couple of pages that have duplicate title tags, and that's because I have couple of pages that are pretty much the same. I took the lower ranking of the two pages and deleted it. Is that all I have to do? Or do I need to setup a redirect or anything else? Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
IP canonization
Hi, I need your opinions about IP canonization. Site www.peoplemaps.com is on 78.136.30.112 IP. Now we redirect that IP to the main page (because of possible duplicate content). But, we have more sites on the same IP address. How can that affect on their SEO? Before redirecting, when we visit that IP address, the browser showed mainpage of www.peoplemaps.com, not any other site. Thanks, Milan edit: We have used 301 redirect.
Technical SEO | | MilanB.0 -
Site getting referral traffic from its self
Buon giorno from zero degrees C freezing fog Wetherby UK On this site http://www.collegeofphlebology.com i ran a referral report via Google Analytics and was surprised ro see referral traffic being counted from its own url, illustration here http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/referral-anomoly.jpg So my question is please how can a site get referral traffic from the same url? Grazie Tanto, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Trying to get on Google page one for keyword "criminal defense attorney san diego". What can I do?
I'm trying to help a friend who is an attorney get on page one for the keyword "criminal defense attorney san diego." So far I've changed his title and description tags since they weren't optimized before. (SERP shows old title tag, however I submitted a XML sitemap through Webmaster tools to get the new title tags updated.) He also had a few duplicate pages, but I took care of that with some 301 redirects. I also added a h1 tag, alt image tag, and more content. I also spent a few hours building links for him. He currently has a page authority of 52 and domain authority of 44 with a decent amount of links pointing to his site. I'm wondering why he's stuck on page 4, when his competitors that have less impressive numbers seem to show up on page 1. I did look at his link profile using OSE and I'm worried that his old SEO guy got him spam links. His website is www.nasserilegal.com, however the page I was focusing on was www.nasserilegal.com/criminal.html Any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | micasalucasa0 -
Do dropdowns count as unique content?
My current site has some extensive unique database content by "widget" type. Currently we display this info into HTML 's, but we are considering utilizing this data in a dropdown field on each respective widget page. I want to ensure we don't have thin content...Does the content within the <option>tags on a dropdown count towards unique content?</option>
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Backlinks to unique login pages
Hi There, This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help! The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform. For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with. Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields. So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this? Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL? Thanks in advance! Henry
Technical SEO | | hnydnn0 -
So I Get An Interior Page To Rank, But Lower. How does that help?
Hi, So, I have a term that would bounce around #3 to 5 for. I make a page some months ago that is solely targeted to that term. And, voila! Google sees the new page as the best result instead of the home page and the new page ranks, but at #9 or #10. Of course the homepage is a stronger page, but the new page is better targeted to that term. Using the handy SEOMoz toolbar, the homepage has a page authority of 59 and the newer interior page has 32. Both are equally functional to my purpose. Part of me just wants to 301 in the interior page to the homepage and forget about it. It would take forever to get that interior page up to a similar page authority through the magic of links. What do you think I should do. I feel like I'm channeling Wile E. Coyote. Thanks! Best...Mike
Technical SEO | | 945010