Now and then you will find a blog article which discusses the risk of hosting your website using a shared IP address. The possible risk (according to many) is that if your site shares one IP address with ten’s or hundred’s other websites and one of these other websites breaks the SE guideline rules, then the search engines may remove or ban that website domain. But they may also ban every other website using the same IP address.

You can read an old (but still actual in the SEO buzz) article about this here.

I can tell you this is not true!

I am not saying that I know everything, and I am not saying there can be some risk using a shared IP address, but not for this specific reason. In fact the opposite (using many dedicated, different C-class, IP addresses) could also do some harm. For example, if you have many sites, and spread them over different dedicated IP addresses and different C-classes, then Google (because they know everything) could see this as a serious practice for SEO. In other words if you are using SEO with the only purpose to rank better then others, I can assure you that Google doesn’t like that.

But there can be reasons that using shared IP addresses can have some negative effects. For example if your webhost messes up with their virtual hosting. Or when using a questionable cheap webhost.

But if you have a white hat website, build according to the SE guidelines and if you are using a reliable webhost with a good reputation (listen to others, read reviews), then using a shared IP address will do you no harm.

Slashdot has published an interview in 2003 (qst.#5) with Graig Silverstein (Google Director of Technology) where Graig stated the following:

Question:

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.

Answer by 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!

And in 2006 Matt Cutts (Head of Google’s Spam team) confirmed this statement again:

I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now.

Suppose that a single website (using black hat, illegal or spammy techniques) on a shared IP address could negatively effect all other (nonrelated, white hat) websites using the same shared IP address, wouldn’t that be a powerful ‘weapon’ to get rid of your competitors?

And yes, there are some advantages when using dedicated IP addresses, but not for the only reason to avoid getting banned from shared IP addresses or virtual hosting.

If you are interested in discussions like this and want to learn more to give you site more exposure, I suggest to visit Aaron Wall’s SEO Community and Training Center.

…Earlier this week, Mr. x received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account….

Read the whole Google horror story here

You can read the original post at Matt Cutts Blog

December 19, 2005

I quote Matt Cutts dream:

I’m not always great about leaving work at work, but I’ve never had SEO dreams before. A few days ago, I dreamt that I was surveying the landscape of domains in our index. There was hardly any spam at all, except for one blip on the landscape, so I zoomed in on it and saw that one lone dental plan site had gotten through our algorithms; all the other spam was down in the noise. For some reason, Oilman was working on a computer to my right. He looked happy.

“What are you so happy about?” I asked.
“My spammy dental plan site is doing really well!” Oilman replied.
“Ah.” I sat for a few seconds and stared at the dental plan domain name that I saw on my screen. Then I turned to him and asked “Is your site named www.get-some-cheap-dental-plans-online-here.ca?”
Oilman got a perplexed look on his face. “Yeah, how did you know the name of the site?”
I smiled as I turned back to my computer and hit the delete key. A second later, a loud wail started from just to my right.

Weird dream, huh? Here’s what I think it means: I shouldn’t eat pepperoni pizza and then go to bed after listening to SEO podcasts on Webmaster Radio.

Although it is just a funny post, it has a serious message:

One day Google will have a human eye on your site and if you didn’t do your SEO work properly, well you probably know which key Matt will hit.

Distributing free widgets with a link to the creator is SPAM! (according to Google)

Google says:

“Widgets that are distributed with a link back to the site that created the widget are fine,” it says. “However, going a step further and selling links to third parties is against our quality guidelines. Sites that employ or distribute such widgets may risk losing rankings.

In this case, the creator of these widgets is a website called “OnePlusYou” which is a free dating site. This website has been banned (with a former website) from the index by using a link in the widget to an off topic website. They started a new website and decided only to use white hat practices and put the link to their original website, which was the (new) free dating site. When they did this, Google replied:

We heard word from Google regarding OnePlusYou, stating it was “the same off-topic widget tricks all over again on another site” and that our new site could suffer the same fate as JustSayHi.com. This was the first communication we’d heard from Google that adding a keyword-rich link from a widget to our own site was an ultra-mega-Google-NO-NO.

So, does this mean that distributing widgets with a link (that can be removed by the user who puts this widget on his website) to the source will be considered as ‘off topic’, in other words can get penalized by Google when doing this?

Learn from: ‘Widgetbait Gone Wild’

Widgets are great stuff for linkbait. But after reading this blogpost I advise you should think twice before implementing a linkbait like this.

Unfortunately there are some real horror stories going around related to SEO or SEM. Especially those stories where website owners didn’t use any unethical practice. Let us learn from these stories and let’s hope that the ‘big’ market leading search engines will learn from it too!

I quote the main issue of this story:

“A person who has access to the company’s AdWords accounts has their own AdWords account. They are a good employee and don’t work on their personal project at the office, but as a good employee they do work on your business while at home. By accessing both AdWords accounts on the same machine, Google decides both accounts are the same person despite their being different. Worst case, the employee breaks the rules with their personal account. The employer finds their campaigns stopped and can’t get them back online.“

Read the whole story of Jay Weintraub here

One of the nightmares you can have is when users can harm your site and that your get penalized by Google.

When using Google’s Webmasters Console you could receive a message if there is an issue with your website (if you aren’t using Google’s Webmaster Console then I am not sure if they ever will contact you).

But nobody wants to receive a message like this (true story):

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some web pages from our search results. Currently
pages from [domainname] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30
days.

The owner if this web site is always using ‘clean SEO’ practice and wasn’t aware of the fact that some of his pages where removed from the index. He discovered this while doing some URL checks. His site didn’t show up anymore using his main keywords, which of course is a shock, especially when you site is your main income.

So what was the cause of this penalty?

His site has the opportunity for (registered) users to add content. In respect of the owner, I will use a theoretical example: A site that offers Bed & Breakfast owners to add their own (ad) accommodation for a fee.

In this case, someone added (on purpose) ‘hidden’ text in the user pages, and a Google filter discovered this. This resulted in a (Google) penalty.

After some communication and explanation with Google, his pages got slowly indexed again.
But nobody is waiting for such penalty, especially if it is beyond your own control.

My advise:

If you have a site where users can add their own content on pages that are indexed (do index, do follow, etc.) then try to use some code that can detect such practice. Or disable HTML functions (formatting text) for these users. Or better, you could build a feature that a Webmaster (or you) always does a content check before publication approval. For other purposes you could consider to use the NO FOLLOW and NO INDEX tags.