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  1. Can other websites on your shared host affect the rank of your website in the Google index? (same IP address as yours, potentially malicious/low-trust content)

  2. Can other websites on your IP class affect the rank of your website in the Google index? (different actual IP, malicious/low-trust content)

Clarification: Domain class, is what you get when you run a whois query on an IP address.

Example:

NetRange:       69.163.128.0 - 69.163.255.255
CIDR:           69.163.128.0/17

PS: Prefer answers with experience or links to trustworthy material, over speculations, assumptions and gut feelings.

Evgeny Zislis
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  • "PS: Prefer answers with experience or links to trustworthy material, over speculations, assumptions and gut feelings." Is that really useful to say? Isn't it obvious? Aren't rules on the sites anyway against purely opinion based answers, which would get anyway downvoted and/orclosed. – Patrick Mevzek Apr 28 '22 at 17:25
  • "IP address range" or "IP block" is the correct term. Not "domain class". Do note that these ranges are recursive (IANA delegates blocks to RIRs, RIRs delegates blocks to LIRs, LIRs delegates blocks to providers, providers may delegate blocks to customers, etc.), so depending on how you check, you may get different blocks hence your conclusions can vary by that. Also note that how a block can be reached (AS paths and such) may be more important for availability/performances (hence ranking possible) than what it contains. – Patrick Mevzek Apr 28 '22 at 17:27

3 Answers3

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Is your IP address neighborhood important for SEO?

It's mentioned in US Patent Application #20050071741 "Information retrieval based on historical data" (recommended reading if you're concerned with how Google works)

In one implementation, a list of known-bad contact information, name servers, and/or IP addresses may be identified, stored, and used in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

... but that doesn't mean that Google presently uses the implementation described - still, why bother hosting in a bad neighborhood (which comes with all kinds of fun problems like e-mail delivery, regular SSH brute force scans, DDoS retaliation against your DoS'ing neighbors, et cetera) when there are plenty of other neighborhoods to choose from?

Addenda: 3/7/2012

Keeping your free hosting service valuable for searchers at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has this advice for hosting providers:

If a free hosting service begins to show patterns of spam, we make a strong effort to be granular and tackle only spammy pages or sites. However, in some cases, when the spammers have pretty much taken over the free web hosting service or a large fraction of the service, we may be forced to take more decisive steps to protect our users and remove the entire free web hosting service from our search results.

This statement reinforces the notion that Google actively penalizes content at the level of the hosting provider.

danlefree
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  • How do you tell if you're in a bad neighborhood? If you're on a web server with 10,000 other websites do you think it's possible to know who all of them are or what they are doing? Especially if you're a small company with no IT department. And it's important to note that a patent does not mean it's being inplemented. Everything is patented nowadays which is why we need patent reform but I digress... – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 01:25
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    How do you tell? Check your IP against spam and proxy blocklists, check your IP against Google's safe browsing tool, and run a reverse lookup for hosts on your IP (it helps to pick a hosting provider which isn't putting 10,000 sites on a single server). The possibility that Google is using an alternative implementation is qualified in my reply, though I would be surprised if an IP (or ASN, for that matter) with a spotty record didn't factor in somehow - it does in most other contexts. – danlefree Oct 30 '10 at 01:39
  • Also, most web hosts have actively enforced ToS. So read the ToS of a web host before you sign up. It's up to them to keep their network clean, so if you choose the right web host, you won't need to worry about checking up on your neighbors. – Lèse majesté Oct 30 '10 at 01:44
  • Check your host against spam and proxy lists? Hostgator isn't on them but you can get a whole IP banned if you do black hat SEO with them which isn't against their terms of service. "Bad neighborhoods" is being used incorrectly in this discussion. A bad neighborhood in SEO is a group of sites related to each in some way that are violating the TOS of the search engines. Common IP addresses may or may not be a factor. Common IPs does not by itself prove two sites are related. But when combined with other factors can strengthen the association. – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 02:11
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    I would recommend not spending time on something like this. IPv4 address ranges are very, very limited, so search engines are generally fine with sites sharing IP addresses, even if they are shared among 100,000 websites; not even to mention how many sites might be on the same C-class ... If you're running a normal website, the IP address is not going to be a deciding factor for search engines. – John Mueller Nov 01 '10 at 19:29
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No. Thousands of websites can be on one IP Address it naturally would not make sense to penalize thousands of unrelated websites because one user on that IP or IP block is using black hat SEO, etc.

To be considered in a bad neighborhood you must actively establish a relationship to their sites in the neighborhood. This is usually done through interlinking although I am sure there are other ways to identify/create a relationship. In these cases IP addresses will be a supporting factor in linking sites in a bad neighborhood together. But by itself it definitely will not affect your rankings or invoke IP-wide penalties.

Possibly Helpful Link

John Conde
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  • The provided link has speculation by non-authoritative people. I am asking the question to see if there is any valid reason for tools like http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/neighbourhood-checker to exist at all ... – Evgeny Zislis Oct 29 '10 at 22:44
  • If you google your question all you will find is speculation as none of the search engines have said anything definitive about it. The best you can do is apply logic and common sense as I did above. I'd say that tool is a great example of bad seo myths running wild. – John Conde Oct 29 '10 at 22:48
  • To be fair, I think web hosts should be held responsible for the type of websites they host in their registered IP bock. So there is some sense in penalizing an entire IP range. The same is done for spam blocking (which is why most professional web hosts actively enforce a no-spamming policy; which is a very good thing IMO), so there is precedent for this. It's also similar to how many ecommerce sites refuse to accept orders from certain countries where the chance of an order being legit is very low. – Lèse majesté Oct 30 '10 at 00:52
  • Do you really think it is fair for potentially thousands of websites to be punished because someone on the other side of the world cloaks? Or has a link farm? How can they know? How can they stop it? Should web hosts police websites for black hat seo techniques which isn't illegal? The only people who can police that are the search engined and they can penalize the apprpriate sites without blanket penalizing IPs. That's like arresting an entire block because a husband cheated on his wife. – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 01:19
  • It's more like punishing an entire bank because that bank allows customers to commit wire fraud. And, as I said, it's already being done with spam. If you choose to get hosting from a company that houses spam servers and makes money from spammers and malware writers, then it's your fault that your emails get bounced by mail servers. It's not hard to find reputable web hosts that actually enforce a reasonable ToS. In fact, you would have to go out of your way to find a web host that allows you to DDoS, spam, host malware, etc. – Lèse majesté Oct 30 '10 at 01:31
  • I agree that it would be unreasonable and impossible to conduct fairly banning by IP. Anything I have ever read about "bad neighbourhoods" is based around linking and not IP related. Would being on an email blacklist affect SEO? If so, I've never heard of this! – BradB Oct 30 '10 at 01:43
  • @Lèse majesté - you're lumping illegal stuff with legal stuff that's just against a search engine's TOS. There's a big difference between the two. There is no way for anyone to know that someone on their IP block is using black hat SEO. It's impossible. And it's not only being done by criminals. Businesses trying to get ahead are doing it, too. They're legit in every way but that. Being on hostgator, which is very reputable, can get you IP banned based on your criteria. If you can't host with them who can you trust? And what host have a TOS against black hat SEO anyway? – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 02:07
  • Banning sites in bulk by IP is a perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bath water – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 02:13
  • @John Conde: I think there's been some confusion. I'm not talking about blacklisting or penalizing IP blocks based on sites using blackhat SEO. I'm suggesting that you penalize IP blocks that are known to harbor spammers and other internet undesirables. If most mail servers refuse to deliver emails from those "bad neighborhoods" then why can't Google deindex or penalize those same IP ranges? – Lèse majesté Oct 30 '10 at 03:22
  • I would say they shouldn't do it based on spam or other non-search related factors alone as they aren't ranking emails, etc. They're ranking web pages. If the website isn't using black hat techniques or delivering malware what else the server is used for is irrelevant from a search engine perspective. Plus if all of the sites on that IP were set up for spam and other bad things the odds are the websites would also be doing black hat SEO stuff and earn their own penalty anyway. – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 03:39
  • But I think lumping people together on a broad characteristic like IP address, or even more dangerous, IP block, is excessive and too error prone to be practical. They could, and should, use IP mapping as a tool to help determine who might be naughty and who might be nice. But in and of itself it's too broad to be used on its own. – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 03:39
  • The point of lumping an IP range together is that you're punishing the web host, not just the sites hosted there. As I mentioned already, there are very few web hosts that tolerate spamming, malware distribution, etc. That means that you have to go out of your way to find such hosts if you're of that segment of society. That also means that hosts which tolerate that sort of behavior tend to have a high concentration of such users. So you wouldn't be banning an IP range because just a handful of bad apples were spamming for only a single week. – Lèse majesté Oct 30 '10 at 07:18
  • There's nothing dangerous about punishing a business who's business model is providing a means for spammers and malware distributors to distribute their garbage. This provides a disincentive for web hosts to profit from spamming and for hosting customers to sign up with shady web hosts. – Lèse majesté Oct 30 '10 at 07:29
  • You assuming a 1-1 correlation between bad web hosts and black hat SEO. This is not the case. In eastern Europe the number of spam hosts is well above average. But not everyone in eastern Europe is a spammer. There are legit sites who only have the means to be hosted locally. Should they be coupled in with the spammers because of proximity? Should entire IPs be arbitrarily penalized when the search engines already have the means to pinpoint who is violating their TOS? There are no arbitrary bonuses in search. Why would there be arbitrary penalties? – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 13:39
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    And should a web host be punished because someone on their server does black hat SEO? NO! It isn't illegal so there's no reason for hosts to police that kind of stuff. Can you imagine if web hosts had to police black hat SEO to stay in business? They'd all go out of business or we'd all be paying $100 a month for hosting to cover their Black Hat SEO enforcers! – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 13:43
  • I never said anything about black hat SEO... And there's nothing arbitrary about penalizing web hosts who facilitate spamming and malware distribution. As well there are Eastern European web hosts that don't allow spamming or malware distribution. In fact, I'm sure they're more common than the bad web hosts who do. So I don't know what you're trying to get at with that example. – Lèse majesté Oct 30 '10 at 15:06
  • You also seem to be in denial about the fact that the seedier parts of the online community are all concentrated in a very small number of service providers--email providers, hosting providers, domain registrars, etc. So clearly the majority of web hosts out there are legit, and the ones that aren't could keep spammers off their networks if they so choose. A web host that finds themselves banned or penalized by Google because they're hosting thousands of spam sites is not a hapless victim. – Lèse majesté Oct 30 '10 at 15:18
  • The question is about seo. Not about spam or other illegal activities. Black seo is not limited to bad servers or bad IPs. It occurs everywhere. So if you blanket ban IPs for it then innocent people are harmed. You're assuming it's only on the servers of criminal enterprises that doing bad things occurs. Unfortunately it's not true. And, once again, why have an arbitrary and broad penalty when they can pinpoint the sites that need to be penalized already? It's clumsy and bad for business. – John Conde Oct 30 '10 at 20:17
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    There's a post by Matt Cutts about this from 2006 (covering a quote from 2003): http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/ "Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses." – John Mueller Nov 01 '10 at 19:37
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I don't ever think that being on the same host with the same ip as another website certainly affects your serps in the search engines. It becomes a problem when yourself starts to create link farm and start linking them together for backlinks on the smae ip.