Google Rankings: Dedicated IP Address or Virtual Hosting with Dynamic IP Address
Google Engineers detail the effects and lack thereof, that hosting types have on Websites’ rankings. The quotes were made over over a three-year span - 2003 to 2006.
http://seroundtable.com/archives/002358.html
Generally speaking having a website on a shared IP address will not cause you any harm. You can rank just fine and there is nothing negative about hosting on shared IP’s. So don’t worry if you site is on it. However what is important to know as I was told is how, Google in particular and possibly other engines look at these static and shared IP. As I was explained when I search engine spider first comes across your site it will parse it with basic HTML 1.0. If its able to do this then it will normally go about getting spidered and indexed. For those sites with a static IP address they will get spidered with HTML 1.0 as its able to resolve the address immediately. If by chance you don’t have a static IP address, Google may go about parse the site with HTML 2,3,4 and so on until its able to resolve the address for your specific site. This can take up to 3 months to happen. In the meantime it will use the IP of the main site on this IP, often times the hosts site. It will come back until its able to find your specific IP. During this period of 1-3 months, any links that you build to your site that is found by Google, will get credited NOT to your site, but to the main root site on the shared IP, often times your host site. Quite interesting. As I understand it, after Google is able to correctly identify your site from others, you will get credited for the links. However in the time period of limbo between that, another site will be getting credit for your links. Something which you probably don’t want to happen. Interesting
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/
the misconception that having multiple sites hosted on the same IP address will in some way affect the PageRanks of those sites. There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP).
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!
