host bad neighbours

[rockarolla]

It seems like on a shared host your neighbours have influence on your page rank. SPAMMers and other sites with sensitive content are considered to be bad neighbours. My experience shows that having bad neighbours can put you in a standstil in the page rank competition for considerable time.

Would appreciate if someone shares some experience.

[webman]

rockarolla,

I don't have any bad experience to share on this, but did find this interesting article about sharing an IP address and page rank / SEO.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/dedicated-vs-shared-ip-addresses-and-seo/6444/

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Does anyone have any current knowledge and or real life experience with the importance or lack of, having a dedicated IP address for your hosting account as far as Google Page Rank and other search engines are concerned? If you have 1 IP address and you add on domains, does that dilute page rank or trust? If it is shared and someone else’s website that shares the IP address gets Google slapped, does that impact my website or blog?

One reader refers to the 2006 post on the Matt Cutts blog which references a statement by Google’s Craig Silverstein in 2003 :

Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!


Cutts adds “I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.”

Of course if you have 1,000 sites running on the same IP address which all link to each other and to bad linking neighborhoods, the PageRank between those links which are being passed along should be diluted and if some of those sites are practicing questionable methods of, well, spamming Google … having them all grouped together should set off some kind of red flags.

[TahoeWeb]

Hello,

This is a very common question when it comes to the famous “bad neighbor syndrome”.
When you are on a shared server account you are dependent on the performance and behavior of your neighbors account. For example if one neighbor violates a TOS and sends out massive amounts of spam, this will load the server and negatively impact the performance of all the accounts located on that server. If this spammer causes the server to get blacklisted, this may also impact all the other accounts that may produce legitimate mailings until the server is whitelisted again. Trying to get whitelisted is a long drawn out process that is very time consuming. In the long run of things…It is safe to say that everything your neighbors do will affect your performance with both loading and search engine placement.

Your webhost tech support should monitor server loads constantly as to avoid these things taking place. However at times situations do happen very fast and support does not have the time to catch it. For example should the server be broken into and cause serious damage, this will cause extended outages for your website. Even if you have a good neighbor and that neighbors website is very popular, well that can also cause temporary performance issues. All or most of the things I have mentioned are things Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. do not like to see.

The worst part is. Consider your website living in one house with 500 other websites. When one website in that house does something wrong, the entire house is affected and punished. After all the search engines only see the IP range, so they have no clue who did what.

[webman]

Tahoe,

Thanks for the additional information, especially about the black listing of an entire server. That would not be good. Are there easy ways to fix this by changing the IPs of the sites on that server until the "bad" range gets white listed again?