It’s a common practice among SEO practitioners to get as many inbound links as they want. Furthermore, it is believed that inbound links from websites with a different IP than the website being optimized are given better points by Google. But is this true?
While browsing through all my RSS subscriptions, I came across Matt’s post which dispells this myth. According to him, links from domains with the same IP are treated the same as links from domains with different IPs. In other words, there could really be no reason why one should worry about the IP address of the sites linking to him.
Matt quotes a section of a particular Slashdot interview with Craig Silverstein (Google’s Director of Technology) which says:
Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don’t come from a unique ip address. Please don’t just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation.
Craig:
I can’t just deny it? What are my other choices? [:)] 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!
Furthermore, Matt confirms Craig’s reply by saying this in his blog post Myth busting: virtual hosts vs. dedicated IP addresses…
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.
What does this mean? How does this affect SEO professionals? Does it mean that all the effort made to gather links from different IPs were wasted? Well, I guess not - they’re still links after all. Nonetheless, this gives me enough reason to breath slowly and calmly when I try to get inbound links from other bloggers like me.
Leave a Reply