Does Shared Hosting Affect SEO? Experts Opinion

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Does Shared Hosting Affect SEO
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Are you on shared hosting & wondering does it affect SEO of your Website?

Do you need a dedicated I.P. for your shared hosting account?

Let’s find out the answer here.

For the beginners, those who are not aware of Shared hosting, It’s a server where lots (10+ up to 200-300) sites are hosted on same server and thus sharing the same I.P.

Usually you can get a private I.P on a shared hosting for $2-5 which is not much if you are running a professional website. Though Matt Cutts said some time back in a video that shared hosting won’t impact your search engine ranking.

One reason I suggest you to get a dedicated I.P. for your hosting is because:

Google allows certain limit on indexing and it’s based on server I.P. On shared hosting if a website is already consuming too many resources (bot crawling) you will be affected and might notice slow indexing or search engine bots are not crawling your blog.

Eespecially I have seen many web-hosting companies offers a complete new package by saying it as SEO hosting, where they give Private I.P’s for your every site.

This way, even being on shared hosting, for the outside world you are on a different system and won’t be counted as hosted on the same server as others. Though such SEO hosting is costly, and the question is as a Webmasters do we need such SEO hosting or Dedicated I.P address for our websites?

I asked the same question on my Facebook and Google+ wall, and I got many answers which might help you to decide if you need to have Private I.P or not:

Question by me:

Quick Question: On a shared hosting how important it is to have your dedicated IP for every site? Does it make any different? Matt Cutts says it doesn’t make any different…anyone who disagrees with this? Suppose you hosted a site on a shared hosting and some bugger running a Porn/Spam/hacking site ..Since most of the firewall uses domain+I.P security to block such spam site….Won’t it affect your Business/Blog/Service traffic?

Bob on my G+ wall added: Anyone with whom you share an IP can do reputational damage to the IP, and under some circumstances that can affect your ability to communicate with certain hosts. Email is the most obvious case if someone sharing your IP gets blocked for spamming; that block probably stops your email as well.

By Jagan: When we ran a web hosting service (specialized for auto blogs), customers keep asking for different C class IPs even though being on shared (technically). I believe it brings some SEO juice. Google doesn’t want all junk from the same IP.

By Saad Kamal:

Shared Hosting with “Dedicated IP” is a good thing to have. In SEO perspective, Your Site’s ip will then become unique to you (and only you). In a typical shared hosting scenario… 100s of the site has the same IP… Now will it improve your ranking? Most likely it will have zero effect ..so matt is definitely right. But It does have some benefits… And dedicated I.P’s are as low as $2/month.
I can point out a couple of use cases where dedicated IP would be the way to go. Hundreds and thousands of blogs use akismet.com for spam protection. And people often forget that “trackbacks” can also be marked as spam. If bad neighborhood sites “Links” to you…as a blog owner you don’t want to publicly show those bad sites in your trackbacks (provided that your trackbacks are public). So what you would do is “Mark as spam”… and now imagine how many times these people get marked as spam … In a shared hosting scenario…if another legit blog now wants to link out to that good website…their trackback might not show as it will be blocked by Akismet for having the same IP.

By Amit Banerjee:

If there are three porn sites hosted on the same shared server, that won’t make much of a difference. But if there are three hundred or three thousand porn sites and your site is hosted by them, that can look a little fishy… I would perform a reverse IP check and if the number of crap sites is less than 10%, I won’t mind going with shared hosting.

By Vaibhav Kanwal:

I tried with a dedicated IP on HostGator Baby plan with the additional $2 for six months. Didn’t notice any change in the period and after reverting too saw no change. That’s best, but then if the cost isn’t an issue which I am certain won’t be for most serious webmasters, then a dedicated IP is reasonable for the peace of mind.

I appreciate all the above comments, but Saad Kamal comment, is quite convincing for any serious webmasters like me to buy a dedicated I.P. Though before I buy a dedicated I.P on my shared hosting, I would love to know your opinion on:

How important it’s to have dedicated I.P for shared hosting?

Note: Bluehost offers dedicated I.P for $3/month. You can grab Bluehost for 60% discount using this discount link.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

29 thoughts on “Does Shared Hosting Affect SEO? Experts Opinion”

  1. Daftarsbo

    How about cloudflare? NS cloudflare can hurt ranking?

  2. john

    many will not provide the dedicated IP without the SSL. They advised it doesnt matter

  3. seo vps

    I am no longer positive the place you are getting
    your info, but great topic. I must spend some time learning much more or working out more.
    Thanks for magnificent info I was searching for this info for my mission.

  4. Ravee

    Hello Harsh Am hosting my 2 websites in hostgator baby plan (shared Hosting) recently i got a Message From Google Webmaster tools As (Pure Spam Manual Action) And its effect to My Entire Website.So if add dedicated ip to my Host.Can i get back my site in Google Again ?

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Ravee
      Dedicated I.P. is always recommended when you are building an authority blog. So without second thought you should get it. Coming back to your Manual spam action thing, are you sure it’s because of the websites hosted on same I.P.? Could you share the email that you received from Webmaster team.

  5. Tanmay

    What if I use CloudFlare. I think thousands of sites share the same IP. Is it safe to use CloudFlare?

    1. Sanjay Kumar Dogra

      yes Cloud Flare is good for same IP

    2. Wahyudi

      CloudFlare has a reverse proxy feature which masks your server IP. There are ways of finding the server if you set it up wrong i.e. MX records, but I personally could not find any if it’s setup correctly.

      An IP lookup only shows CloudFlare IP’s, not your server ones.

  6. Animish

    I think, hosting a website in India is the best option as far as shared hosting is concerned. Because no any p-rn site or illegal download site can’t be hosted in India. Also, if you have a neutral domain, hosting location doesn’t matter (please guide me with this).

    1. Vaibhav Vibs

      Dear ANIMISH

      I would like to share few things firstly many people do host adult website in India and Pakistan they use other country based website but still they can host in INDIAN server to as they dont Check.

      Hosting matters because if you website is down due to server bandwidth then you website can be a bad crawling that can harm your ranking dear.

  7. Larry James

    I have heard that the location of your sever has an affect on your rankings. If your server is located in U.K. it you would rank better on http://www.google.co.uk than you wold on google.com. Has anyone else heard this?

  8. shakil

    I think having an unique ip is really important to get rid of spammer neighbors. Sometimes, others’ activity can hurt your email venerability and search engine reputation.

  9. Hamiduzzaman

    It will not affect your site ranking if your IP is used by a few spammy site.But when a lot of spammy site is using your IP then it can affect you badly.

  10. Rohit

    There is another aspect of shared hosting and it certainly affects your SERP..lets say there are hundreds of websites being hosted on a single ip ( mostly on a single server ) , this certainly affects your ping time. Most of the popular search engines are taking ping time of the site as one of the indicator. If your ping time is bad, this will lower your SERP. Rather than looking for dedicated ip, one should pay attention to specifications of the server and how many sites are sharing its resources.

  11. prem pandit

    Use always Dedicated ip with Shared server to prevent any future problem with bad neighbours site

  12. Ashish

    Harsh I believe not everyone can afford this dedicated Ip or so called SEO hosting but yes initially one can begin with whatever best comes in their way at affordable prices and once you can afford definitely switch to dedicated IP for every site.
    I hope even you initially started finding things which are real economical but now you go for the best even if it is costly.!!

  13. Sahil Kotak

    True. It won’t affect your rankings much in anyway. But it is best to use it to avoid any kind of problems which spammy sites can cause.

  14. Rakesh Narang

    Go for a web hosting plan that is not cheap, it will solve most of your worries. People who host spam websites want to minimize their costs and maximize their profits (which always remain zero). So, I say one should go for good web hosting companies, reputed, even they have to spend some more money.

    -Rakesh 🙂

  15. yaseen khan

    Thanks harsh, nice post…. right now i have few domains, thinking same…….. going to purchase a dedicated ip address for all domains…….

  16. Yousuf Khan

    Saad Kamal said very much true. I didn’t knew about the ip thing. I will soon try to get a Dedicated ip or upgrade to a VPS.
    Thanks

  17. ASAK

    Yes, i also have this question.
    Harsh, can you please tell me that the VPS( virtual private server) is good to move or not. Actually, i heard from someone that shared hosting is never good. That’s why i need to know that whether VPS is actually private or it is just another form of shared hosting ?

  18. Sidhant

    True that it won’t really have much impact on search engine rankings. Though, if I were you, I would really consider going for a dedicated IP, taking in consideration the Akisment point, and other porn sites point by commentators! At least it will give you a mental peace and satisfaction.

  19. Zenil Shroff

    Very nice post harsh, but as i said on FB, you’ll find 90% people saying that there is no great impact by having unique I.P. All that we want is good backlinks and top class content.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      I agree with you Zenil but I also can’t disagree with Saad comment and his point of view. Though I will wait for some more inputs from readers and will see if dedicated I.P on shared hosting makes any sense or it’s just an investment.

  20. ZK@Web Marketing Tips

    It is a good investment if you are running a professional blog and the pricing is low…you don’t want your blog being impacted just because you are on a shared IP

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      I agree but from all suggestion it’s like even if we don’t it’s alright. Though one should check what other sites are hosted on same server.

      1. Nick

        Great point Harsh, I would still recommend dedicated IP because it’s hard to keep track on what others are hosting.

      2. kaviyarasu

        Hi harsh,With some of my friends i am trying to create classified site using shared hosting for our small town.Suggestion need from your side.
        Please help……….

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