Article #1: http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/cate ... intable=noArticle #2 - I received this in an email and couldn't find a copy on the web
o Static IP Sites Rank Higher?by Jon Ricercahttp://www.SearchEngineGeek.comThis is a hotly debated topic. Some SEOs claim thatsites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim that shared hosting is just fine... that it would be stupid for search engines to penalize shared hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites are currently using name based hosting.First, let's define what we are talking about when we say "static IP" vs "name based" hosting. Here are some synonyms:For "static hosting", the following all mean the same thing: static IP, dedicated IP, http/1.0, non-shared hosting. For "dynamic hosting", the following all mean the same thing: dynamic IP, name based hosting, http/1.1.Let's take a brief history of the Internet to put things more in focus. Once upon a time, every host on the Internet had a unique IP address. It is usually expressed as 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by dots. An example would be 207.44.161.131. There are billions of such IP addresses possible... however, there is a finite number. An organization called ARIN hands out IP addresses in the western hemisphere while another organization handles Europe and another Asia. Those organizations noticed several years ago that we were going to eventually run out of those IP addresses because of the proliferation of web-sites. At the time, every website had it's own dedicated IP address that was associated with it's domain name.The solution? A new protocol was developed called HTTP 1.1 (to replace HTTP 1.0). The new protocol allowed more than one domain/website to share the same IP address. In fact, hundreds of websites can now share the same IP address. The new type of hosting is called "name based", "shared IP", "http 1.1", etc.Some SEOs theorize that your choice of dedicated hosting vs. shared hosting might affect your rankings. Some others claim that is ridiculous because all hosting will eventually be shared in order to preserve IP addresses. Which are correct?I decided to run it through our statistical analysis engine to get the facts. Here is the methodology I used to answer this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then pinged each site to get it's IP address. I then tried to visit the site using the IP address. With shared hosting, this isn't possible. You get some kind of generic page instead of the specific site you want. I tallied my results for each of the first eight rankings.On the Y-axis, you will see the number of sites found that use a static IP (do not use shared/name based hosting). On the X-axis, we have rankings from 1 to 8. Here is the graph showing Yahoo and Google results:http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/de05.gif(Note to webmasters: You are welcome to hot link to the above graph or even copy it to your own site. You are also welcome to delete this note.)First, it is interesting to note that the number of sites using shared vs. dedicated hosting is just about half and half. We expect that as time goes on, more and more sites will be using shared hosting.The second thing to note is that there is no trend for either Yahoo or Google that would indicate any preference for either type of site. Google might show a slight preference for static IP. Yahoo might show a slight preference for shared hosting. The net effect is null. The correlations for both are very close to zero (on a scale of -100 to +100, Google's correlation was a +35 and Yahoo's was a -21). I generally consider anything from -35 to +35 to be statistically insignificant.Do you use dedicated hosting in order to improve your rankings? Don't bother. There isn't any advantage in this factor. Often dedicated hosting is more expensive than static IP hosting... so save your money and invest it in other factors that do affect your ranking!Notes:1. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.2. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associates during the prior month.Conclusion:Sites using static hosting do not rank significantly higher or lower than sites using shared hosting on both Yahoo and Google.This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that both of these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a "window.open" command higher on average.their method of testing is very flawed. I noticed that as soon as I read it. so I expected that the dedicated sites would rank higher because of it... even with this flawed method, the difference was barely noticable.how was it flawed?it doesn't show cause and effect, it shows correlation.if well ranking sites correlated with static IPs, that wouldn't prove a thing. why?who has dedicated hosting? big sites. who ranks well? big sites. big sites are more likely to be on dedicated hosts because they can afford it, among other reasons.Well, dedicated or shared doesn't affect the PageRank, that's all about the linkage. Linkage doesn't matter whether it's on a shared or dedicated IP.I have several sites running on dedicated IPs, and I have several sites runnong on shared IPs.After moving a couple of the sites from dedicated to shared a year or so ago, I didn't see any difference in the listing results - and it had cached the pages at the new shared IP. Now, obviously, a year has passed, the sites have gone from PR2 or 3 to PR5 or 6, and are getting a lot more traffic, but I've never seen any evidence that dedicated IP addresses make any difference to SERPS positioning.Btw, dedicated hosting != dedicated IP.You could have your own dedicated host, own the entire server and have plenty of sites sharing the same IP address.The people who rank big are those with lots of SE-Readable content and lots of PageRank, regardless of whether they're shared or dedicated IPs.But like disgust says, it stands to reason that as a site grows it comes under a heavier load, and if it's earning the income to justify the expense, moves onto a dedicated server - possibly with a unique IP address not being shared by other sites. This unique IP address in itself does not constitute proof that IP based sites rank any higher than name based sites. Just that the site already ranks high, gets a lot of hits & traffic, and can afford to upgrade. Obviously going dedicated means you have more control over the system, and more power (as it's not being shared with a coupla hundred other people) to make your site even bigger, and hence rank even higher.though maybe someone would see this and comment: "but the end result is that both of these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a "window.open" command higher on average"Has anyone ever seen this....should we all add one window.open command to our pages?If you get a dedicated IP, in my opinion you should do some research on it first (if you know the IP (or IP range) before hand). Check blacklists. I recently got given an IP in a block previously used by spammers, I'm not yet sure if this has effected my position with Google (if the spammers have used it to spam SERPS this could be the case), but now I'm being forced to relay all my emails through another SMTP server just to stop my emails bouncing.If you get a clean IP, I don't think it makes a difference.Great advice webmasterbrain....I had some email problems with my last host only to find out someone was using the open relay on the mail server to send spam. You can check your ip address here: relays.ordb.org, dnsbl.njabl.org,sbl.spamcop.org
o Static IP Sites Rank Higher?by Jon Ricercahttp://www.SearchEngineGeek.comThis is a hotly debated topic. Some SEOs claim thatsites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim that shared hosting is just fine... that it would be stupid for search engines to penalize shared hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites are currently using name based hosting.First, let's define what we are talking about when we say "static IP" vs "name based" hosting. Here are some synonyms:For "static hosting", the following all mean the same thing: static IP, dedicated IP, http/1.0, non-shared hosting. For "dynamic hosting", the following all mean the same thing: dynamic IP, name based hosting, http/1.1.Let's take a brief history of the Internet to put things more in focus. Once upon a time, every host on the Internet had a unique IP address. It is usually expressed as 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by dots. An example would be 207.44.161.131. There are billions of such IP addresses possible... however, there is a finite number. An organization called ARIN hands out IP addresses in the western hemisphere while another organization handles Europe and another Asia. Those organizations noticed several years ago that we were going to eventually run out of those IP addresses because of the proliferation of web-sites. At the time, every website had it's own dedicated IP address that was associated with it's domain name.The solution? A new protocol was developed called HTTP 1.1 (to replace HTTP 1.0). The new protocol allowed more than one domain/website to share the same IP address. In fact, hundreds of websites can now share the same IP address. The new type of hosting is called "name based", "shared IP", "http 1.1", etc.Some SEOs theorize that your choice of dedicated hosting vs. shared hosting might affect your rankings. Some others claim that is ridiculous because all hosting will eventually be shared in order to preserve IP addresses. Which are correct?I decided to run it through our statistical analysis engine to get the facts. Here is the methodology I used to answer this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then pinged each site to get it's IP address. I then tried to visit the site using the IP address. With shared hosting, this isn't possible. You get some kind of generic page instead of the specific site you want. I tallied my results for each of the first eight rankings.On the Y-axis, you will see the number of sites found that use a static IP (do not use shared/name based hosting). On the X-axis, we have rankings from 1 to 8. Here is the graph showing Yahoo and Google results:http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/de05.gif(Note to webmasters: You are welcome to hot link to the above graph or even copy it to your own site. You are also welcome to delete this note.)First, it is interesting to note that the number of sites using shared vs. dedicated hosting is just about half and half. We expect that as time goes on, more and more sites will be using shared hosting.The second thing to note is that there is no trend for either Yahoo or Google that would indicate any preference for either type of site. Google might show a slight preference for static IP. Yahoo might show a slight preference for shared hosting. The net effect is null. The correlations for both are very close to zero (on a scale of -100 to +100, Google's correlation was a +35 and Yahoo's was a -21). I generally consider anything from -35 to +35 to be statistically insignificant.Do you use dedicated hosting in order to improve your rankings? Don't bother. There isn't any advantage in this factor. Often dedicated hosting is more expensive than static IP hosting... so save your money and invest it in other factors that do affect your ranking!Notes:1. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.2. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associates during the prior month.Conclusion:Sites using static hosting do not rank significantly higher or lower than sites using shared hosting on both Yahoo and Google.This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that both of these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a "window.open" command higher on average.their method of testing is very flawed. I noticed that as soon as I read it. so I expected that the dedicated sites would rank higher because of it... even with this flawed method, the difference was barely noticable.how was it flawed?it doesn't show cause and effect, it shows correlation.if well ranking sites correlated with static IPs, that wouldn't prove a thing. why?who has dedicated hosting? big sites. who ranks well? big sites. big sites are more likely to be on dedicated hosts because they can afford it, among other reasons.Well, dedicated or shared doesn't affect the PageRank, that's all about the linkage. Linkage doesn't matter whether it's on a shared or dedicated IP.I have several sites running on dedicated IPs, and I have several sites runnong on shared IPs.After moving a couple of the sites from dedicated to shared a year or so ago, I didn't see any difference in the listing results - and it had cached the pages at the new shared IP. Now, obviously, a year has passed, the sites have gone from PR2 or 3 to PR5 or 6, and are getting a lot more traffic, but I've never seen any evidence that dedicated IP addresses make any difference to SERPS positioning.Btw, dedicated hosting != dedicated IP.You could have your own dedicated host, own the entire server and have plenty of sites sharing the same IP address.The people who rank big are those with lots of SE-Readable content and lots of PageRank, regardless of whether they're shared or dedicated IPs.But like disgust says, it stands to reason that as a site grows it comes under a heavier load, and if it's earning the income to justify the expense, moves onto a dedicated server - possibly with a unique IP address not being shared by other sites. This unique IP address in itself does not constitute proof that IP based sites rank any higher than name based sites. Just that the site already ranks high, gets a lot of hits & traffic, and can afford to upgrade. Obviously going dedicated means you have more control over the system, and more power (as it's not being shared with a coupla hundred other people) to make your site even bigger, and hence rank even higher.though maybe someone would see this and comment: "but the end result is that both of these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a "window.open" command higher on average"Has anyone ever seen this....should we all add one window.open command to our pages?If you get a dedicated IP, in my opinion you should do some research on it first (if you know the IP (or IP range) before hand). Check blacklists. I recently got given an IP in a block previously used by spammers, I'm not yet sure if this has effected my position with Google (if the spammers have used it to spam SERPS this could be the case), but now I'm being forced to relay all my emails through another SMTP server just to stop my emails bouncing.If you get a clean IP, I don't think it makes a difference.Great advice webmasterbrain....I had some email problems with my last host only to find out someone was using the open relay on the mail server to send spam. You can check your ip address here: relays.ordb.org, dnsbl.njabl.org,sbl.spamcop.org