Protecting against bad neighbours comes almost instinctively in the real world. There’s very little chance you’d end up in a bad neighbourhood with your business because you’ve learned how to interpret all of the little signals that give one away. When you’re selecting a physical home for your website, however, not only are those signals not present, but the neighbourhood is invisible as well.

The types of bad neighbours we’re talking about here are those involved on your server. When you sign up to a web hosting company, you have very little knowledge of the other businesses they serve. If you join up with a shared IP package, you have no idea whether your new neighbours are nice and harmless or notorious spammers. These neighbours can have an impact on your site’s reputation with the search engines.

The IP address of a website isn’t something that comes up very often in search engine optimization talk. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t important. Your site’s IP can have a big impact on how you fare with the search engines for the duration of its existence. This is because the search engines make associations between sites with the same or similar IPs. The main reason for this is to protect against linking scams, but a side effect is that a bad neighbour can scupper your rankings.

Here are some of the ways your IP can affect your site:

*Bad neighbours. This is the major concern for any business looking at search engine optimisation. Penalties for your neighbours could affect you too.

*Slow response times. A slow response time can lose your site users and bring down your ranking. Speeding up page downloads is a basic search engine optimization tactic, but it’s harder when the reason lies with your server. Shared hosting has a tendency to slow things down.

*Increased risk of attack with shared servers. This is a more practical consideration, but one that’s still worth taking into account. Every point of entry on a website is vulnerable to malicious attacks, which is why a good security system is vital to SEO. When your site shares space on a server with several others, the risk increases. Many businesses have found their sites attacked through the back door of their server.

*Google appears to care about IP addresses. The world’s major search engine’s official stand is that there is no difference between dedicated and shared IP addresses. Thoughtful types in the SEO realm, however, have noticed that sites with dedicated IP addresses make it to the first page almost all the time.

Having a dedicated server isn’t an option for every site. Dedicated IP addresses are more expensive than going for the shared option. The advantages need to be weighed up against the increased costs. You might find that a dedicated IP really doesn’t make enough of a difference to be bothered with. It is important, however, to take the issue into consideration as a part of your search engine optimisation campaign. Discuss this and other issues with our experts at SEO Consult Australia.