Though the biggest search engine Google, says that you don’t need a dedicated IP address to rank better in search engines. But, I have noticed that after the recent Google PR updates most of the top ranking sites does have a dedicated IP address.

In this article, on UK Web Hosting Blog, I will explain you the advantages and the websites that will need to have a dedicated IP address to boost their search engine ranking.

If you are running an Anonymous FTP enabled website to allow your site visitors to download the files via your FTP server anonymously, then you are going to require a dedicated IP address. Typically, such types of sites are file sharing websites or big mirror download sites. Basically, you don’t need a dedicated IP to FTP files from a server through a username and password, but if you want your visitors to access files from ftp://yourdomain.com/file.zip without having to login, then get a dedicated IP.

For an e-commerce site, if you ever want to accept credit cards on your website, you are going to need a secure connection to do it. It is recommended as a website with a Dedicated IP address is considered to be more secured in comparison to a website with a Shared IP address. SSL certificate is what you will need to secure the customers credit cards details and to install SSL certificate you will require a dedicated IP for your site. So if you plan to accept credit cards through your website at any point, don’t forget to buy a dedicated IP. By installing a SSL cert, you can redirect visitors to the secure connection for your site.

Benefits or Advantages of Dedicated IP for SEO

Some people may say that having your website on a dedicated IP will give you a boost in search engine ranking results for that particular website. Well, I completely don’t agree with this.

If you have one website, a dedicated IP will not rank you higher in the search engines. BUT, if you have a multiple websites, it is to your advantage to put each of these on a different IP because the search engine is less likely to connect your websites together. Below example will help you understand this well:

Suppose you have 5 websites and want to make a 6th. Your 5 websites are ranked but are all on the same IP address. You place a link on each of your 5 websites to your 6th in order to pass on rank value to the 6th. The search engine will see that your new site has links from 5 websites. When it goes to check the IP’s for the sites linking to the 6th, it will find that they are all hosted on the same server because the IP addresses are the same. The search engine will assign less rank value to the 6th site because it knows that the 5 sites linking to it are all related / owned by the same person. If you put each site on a different IP, it will think that the sites are totally unrelated therefore assigning more link value to those links.

Also, according to a Google Engineer, when a Search Engine Spider first visits your website, it analyzes your website with basic HTML 1.0. If the Spider is successful in analyzing your website then it will go about and your website will get indexed. If your website will be hosted with a Dedicated IP address then it will get indexed directly as the spider will be able to resolve the website directly. Due to this the website will not be accessed with Basic HTML 1.0. Hence, if the website will be resolved soon, it will get indexed soon.