IP Addresses

What is an IP address?

Before going deeper into the rabbit hole, we need to explain what an IP address is. Everyone has seen an IP address, whether he realized it or not. IP stands for “Internet Protocol”, and domain names use these IP addresses to take people and show them the content of their website. IP addresses use the DNS system. You can imagine the DNS system as a vast registry that contains all the domain names and the IP address behind them.

Common types of IP addresses

Dedicated IP

A web hosting server can have many IP addresses responsible for different purposes: web service, mail service, malware protection service, web proxies, CDN, etc. When one IP address on the server is assigned to your domain name and all of the services related to it, then this IP address is considered as “dedicated“.

Shared IP

A shared IP address is perhaps the most common one you will use. It works exactly like a dedicated IP address with only one difference – you are not the sole user of this IP, and other websites and services also use it. This entire process became possible when Virtual Hosting came into being a while back. Web hosting has not been so accessible and flexible ever since, and thanks to this fantastic technology, pretty much everyone can start their online experience at a very affordable price. 

Proxy IP

A proxy IP address is (in most cases) a shared IP address used by CDN providers such as Cloudflare, Sucuri, or Ezoic to offer various services to their users – Security, Speed, Optimization, etc. To get this IP address, you would typically need to use their nameservers. Even though you may have initially used your current host’s IP address, you will start utilizing the proxy IP when implementing the new nameservers. You may have issues with these IPs in sporadic cases because your current host’s Firewall could block them. 

Does the IP address of your website affect SEO: Shared vs Dedicated IP

So, the word around the web is that having a dedicated IP address improves your ranking and improves your website’s speed.

There is no hard evidence anywhere or official statement by search engines that this is the case. Moreover, a Google employee who works in the Webmaster Trends Analytics department confirmed that having a dedicated IP has no impact on rankings and his recommendation was on point:

“It’s widespread for sites to be on the same IP address. That’s the way the internet works. A lot of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) use the same IP address as well for different sites, and that’s also perfectly fine.”

John Mueller

“So what I recommend doing here is trying to take a step back and focus on fewer sites and make them strong, good, and unique. Populate them with great content and unique products, so then you don’t have this selection of many sites that are essentially doing the same thing.”

John Mueller

Your SEO and google rankings are entirely dependent on the quality of the content you produce, and the IP address itself will not impact it.

Closing remarks on does IP affect SEO and google ranking?

Let’s go over all of the discussed topics related to shared and dedicated IP addresses:

• Dedicated and Shared IP addresses practically do the same thing – the dedicated IP address only does for a single domain/service. At the same time, the “shared” is used by everyone on the server.
• Using a Dedicated IP address has no impact on your website’s SEO or google rankings.
• A dedicated IP address will not improve the speed of your website. Speed is a function of many things, such as well-optimized code and content along with server setup.
• A dedicated IP address is useful when you want to control and manage your domain’s outbound emails. 
• Security — On the shared server, your website can share an IP address with another website that has been marked as malware. In such cases some network security programs can “null route” requests to these IPs and it will make your website unreachable. Also some anti-virus software may mark all websites with the same IP as malware, which will cause false alerts against your website and such kind of alerts can be displayed in most of modern browsers. So having a dedicated IP can be a good way out. 
• SEO and Shared IP addresses — It may happen that your website  is hosted on a shared server with a website considered as ‘spammy’. However when there is a mix of ‘spammy’ and ‘normal’ websites on the same IP (like on most of shared hosting), there is nothing to worry about.