Shared hosting, dedicated hosting and SEO

Recently, one of our clients was very keen to host his site on a dedicated IP address, since someone mentioned to him that shared hosted sites will have a negative impact on sculpting page rank and eventually lead to search engine ranking problems.

It was believed that a shared hosting may have 100’s and 1000’s of sites that share a common IP address that link to each other. Off these sites, there may be a few sites that carry out techniques to deceive Google for the sole purpose of getting better page ranks and higher search engine visibility, so having such sites linked to your website is a sure invite for Google penalization. Whereas, a dedicated hosting provides a unique IP address and space on the server for a single website which can have more positive impact in sculpting page rank and search engine positions.

Is this statement true or just a myth?

Let me make it clear that the above statement is a fallacy. It was a myth, but it had the entire SEO community swearing by it…

Thanks to Matt Cutts and Craig Silverstein for busting this myth.

Matt Cutts in his blog post "Myth Busting: virtual hosts vs dedicated IP addresses" refers to Craig Silverstien’s interview in the year 2003, where he answers the actual truth about shared and dedicated IP addresses.

Final conclusion: Sites hosted under both shared and dedicated IP addresses are treated alike. So, stop worrying about this and make sure that your internet service provider doesn’t misconfigure your site, else the myth might transform into a reality.