Feb 13, 2016
How does IP address reputation affect my site?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, helps your brand find its target audience. The search engine optimization of your site effectively does the market research and the marketing for your company. By locating the people whose interests are relevant to your company and by putting your site at or near the top of the results, your message will be delivered to the most people.
One major factor in determining the effectiveness of SEO is the reputation of the IP address on which your site resides. Your site’s page-response time is another.
The Problem
Depending on your web hosting plan, multiple sites can be sharing a single IP. Now this isn’t always bad. If a dubious website on your IP practices spamming or hosts distasteful content on their site, the IP can become blacklisted and sites associated with the IP may not be discoverable through search engines, like Google.
Some regions censor content by means of indexing and blacklisting the IP addresses of websites, rather than by domain names. This potentially could cause neighboring websites to be unavailable to an entire region simply because it shares an IP address with other websites.
With email, blacklisted IPs can cause considerable damage by disrupting critical business communications. Sharing an email server with other sites practicing spam or phishing scams will likely cause emails to be delivered directly to spam folders, if delivered at all. Many email providers will reject any email received from known blacklisted IPs.
The Solution
A dedicated IP guarantees your company isn’t disadvantaged by these negative effects. If you wouldn’t operate a physical branch of your business next door to these kinds of companies, why host your website next to them?
Shared hosting is a great solution for many websites, and a good hosting company will screen their clients to ensure that spamming and negative content doesn’t take place. For some websites, like busy ecommerce stores, a higher level of web hosting is needed, like KVM VPS or dedicated servers. If your site is experiencing high traffic or if your site collects information from visitors, consider the benefits of a dedicated IP address to protect your business.
