[General] Search Engine Ranking Myths

Searching engine ranking based on a website’s IP address is still a topic that has a lot of discussion. A lot of people still believe that in order to maximize their search engine ranking, specifically with Google, that they must have a dedicated IP. This is a myth. This has been stated several times by people and developers from inside Google.

Matt Cutts is a developer for Google. He runs a blog – http://www.mattcutts.com – where he discusses some of the ins and outs of the Google algorithm. He made a post way back in 2006, where he actually reference a slashdot post from Craig Silverstein, Google’s Director of Technology, concerning this:

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!

Why is this important?

You may have heard recently, and if you haven’t you will in the coming months, about the death of IPv4 address space. IPv4 allows for a maximum of 4,294,967,296 IP addresses. That may seem like a lot, but keep in mind the world’s people population currently stand at about 6,973,738,433. That’s a difference of 2,678,771,137. Also factor in that of the 4,294,967,296 IPv4 address space, you have to dedicated about 18,000,000 for private networks (which aren’t Internet routable) and 270,000,000 multicast IP addresses. That leaves you with only 4,006,967,296. Again, that may seem like a lot. But just think, every Internet connection, every smartphone, every Internet connected device, every web server, requires at least 1 of those IP addresses. There just aren’t a lot of available IPv4 addresses any more. We can’t get them, our datacenter partners can’t get them, they’re just not there to get. IP allocation systems (ARIN in North America) are being much more strict with their requirements for releasing IP addresses, so that only users that really need a dedicated IP address will be able to get them.

In order to consolidate IPv4 space, the HTTP 1.1 protocol revision was written to allow for “VirtualHosts” on a web server. This essentially allows a web server to disperse web traffic based on the hostname that is sent along with each HTTP packet, instead of via an IP address, allowing IP address space on a web server to be shared. Google, Bing, and all of the major search engine providers know this. They would be fools if they did not. Perhaps it used to be common place for websites to have their own dedicated IP address, this is no longer a requirement (accept for in case of SSL secure certificates, but that’s another topic, and most websites do not have SSL secure certificates).

If you haven’t heard about the death of IPv4 you will soon. The Internet is very quickly approaching a move to IPv6 which allows for many, many, many more addresses (approximately 3.4 x 10³⁸).

So how does this affect search engine ranking?

Having a dedicated IP address has no bearings on your pagerank. If you really want to improve your search engine ranking, then you need to focus on the content, the quality of content of your website and get others to legitimately link to your site. If your sole purpose of building sites is to link back and forth with the hope of increasing your page rank, this is a violation of Google guidelines, and it won’t matter if you are on a dedicate IP address or not, this type of activity will have a negative impact on your pagerank.

This is discussed specifically from Google:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

So pagerank and search engine visibility is based much more on content than anything else. If you have solid content that people want to read about, this is the number one thing that will move you up the search engine ladder.

So remember, if you want to increase your pagerank and your visibility on search engine result pages, a dedicated IP address is not necessary for this. SEO techniques that advise a dedicated IP address are a marketing ploy used by companies to try and get more money from you. If you really want to improve your pagerank you need to focus on the content of your website and getting legitimate users to link to your site. If you try to circumvent Google’s pageranking system by building link farms and backlinks, then this can have a negative impact on your site’s pagerank, defeating the whole point of the links.

Steven