Do Static IP Sites Rank Higher?

To be honest, I really am not sure. And like many of you out there, I too have heard the debates rage on about this. For those of you that have not heard about this concept of SEO related bias, read all about it below…

This is a hotly debated topic. Some SEOs claim that sites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim that shared hosting is just fine… that it would be stupid for search engines to penalize shared hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites are currently using name based hosting.

First, let’s define what we are talking about when we say “static IP” vs “name based” hosting. Here are some synonyms:

For “static hosting”, the following all mean the same thing: static IP, dedicated IP, http/1.0, non-shared hosting. For “dynamic hosting”, the following all mean the same thing: dynamic IP, name based hosting, http/1.1.

Let’s take a brief history of the Internet to put things more in focus. Once upon a time, every host on the Internet had a unique IP address. It is usually expressed as 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by dots. An example would be 207.44.161.131. There are billions of such IP addresses possible… however, there is a finite number. An organization called ARIN hands out IP addresses in the western hemisphere while another organization handles Europe and another Asia. Those organizations noticed several years ago that we were going to eventually run out of those IP addresses because of the proliferation of web-sites. At the time, every website had it’s own dedicated IP address that was associated with it’s domain name. Source: Search Engine Articles

[tags]ranking,static ip,arin,proliferation,dynamic ip[/tags]