Over the last decade of working online, I’ve always ensured that sites I’ve done SEO (search engine optimization) on are located on a dedicated IP address. I’m not sure where I picked up this tip, but it’s always the first thing I start with. Whenever I conduct a whois look up on a site and see that they’re not using a dedicated IP address, I know they haven’t done a complete SEO job. In layman’s terms, a dedicated IP address is a group of numbers (ie: XX.XX.XX.XXX) that is unique to your website (no other site shares it). In order to have private name servers or an SSL certificate for your website, you’ll have to be on a dedicated IP. These are typically around $1 per month from most hosting providers. Most shared hosting plans allow several hundred or thousand to be hosted on the same IP (which can be a nightmare if the IP gets banned for SPAM). Enough with the hosting lingo, does a dedicated IP address really help your SERP (search engine results page) position?

Recently, I was working on a website in a hurry, and decided to go against a dedicated IP. With our recent server problems, I have all of our available system IPs assigned to various websites, therefore I didn’t have any free, and didn’t want to wait to purchase one before setting this site online. Given this, I’ve had the hardest time getting this site to rank, even for low volume search terms. Remember recently when I got a website ranking number one within hours? I was using a dedicated IP address. I’m going to switch this site over to a dedicated IP and see how big of a difference it makes in Google’s indexing process. I’ll keep everyone posted on how the results pan out. Remember, if you’re thinking about switching your site to a dedicated IP address, you may incur some down time as the change propagates (usually within 48 hours).