If you are serious on building a business with a model that is focused on the World Wide Web, i will suggest the use of a dedicated IP address for your domain, however this has got nothing to do with achieving higher rankings in the search results. Why? Before i move into the advantages of having dedicated IP address for an online business, let's understand the model of Shared IP and Dedicated IP.

Shared IP Address
This is one single IP address shared by hundreds of websites or domains. Most likely or not, you have no control over which type of websites that will be sharing the IP address with yours, it may be illegal sites, adult sites or spamming sites. By virtue of fact, a website can get penalized, banned or blacklisted when any other websites on the shared IP address violates guidelines such as email spamming, link spamming, etc.

Dedicated IP Address
This is one unique IP address that only points to your domain name. With a dedicated IP address, your website will not be associated with any other websites that might influence the reputation of your domain. Type 66.7.204.164 and you will be able to access our website too because this domain sits on a dedicated IP address. In additon, websites that require additional security such as SSL certificate will also requires a dedicated IP address.

Advantages of Dedicated IP Address
1) Unique IP that has no associations with other websites
2) Allows additional security such as SSL Certificate

Myth #1 - Dedicated IP Address Gets Higher Rankings For a Website
Bust the myth. I have to strongly disagree with this myth that has been circulating around the Net for years. Major search engines such as Google handles shared IP and dedicated IP in the same manner, it does not give advantages to a dedicated IP address in terms of rankings.

HOWEVER, it does help in terms of offpage optimization to have a dedicated IP address for your domain. Why? Being unique means having no relations with harmful or spamming sites that might affect the SEO value or reputation of a website that sits on the same IP address. Do you wish to share an IP address with hundreds of adult sites, gambling sites, spamming sites or virus sites? If you run a reputable business, I suppose your answer will be a definite NO. Dedicated IP is also recommended for webmasters that perform inter-linking between a range of websites that is owned by the same individual or company.

Myth #2 - Emails Can Be Sent Through A Dedicated IP That Is Solely For One Individual or Company
This is obviously not true. It is very common among web hosting companies to set up an email server that sends all emails through one single IP addess. Problems arise when IP address is blacklisted for email spamming activities that may be done by any of the websites on the same email server. There is almost nothing you can do to prevent this aside from getting your own dedicated email server, however there may still be problems if spamming activities come from any of the IP address that falls within the same block of IPs.

In Conclusion
Hopefully this post address the concerns over the relationship between Dedicated IP Address and Higher Rankings in SERPs. If you are unsure about the websites that is sharing the same IP addess as yours, you can do a check using the Reverse IP Tool. Do you have something to share? Let us know more about your thoughts by commenting on this post.

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