Search Engine Optimization ...IP addresses, & Websites. take special note here

An example is best used to illustrate my point: Go to http://www.bankes.com/nslookup.htm, as shown in the screenshot (this an nslookup program which I found using Google)

I typed in the numerical ip address, 64.176.76.235, of one of my sites and got this result below.

This confirms that I have an unique ip address called www.fibreglass-water-features.com.

If I do the search by typing in my site pondsandpumps.co.za I get

If I do the search by typing in another of my sites, focuskoi.co.za I get exactly the same result.

This confirms that neither of these two web sites have their own unique ip address and that they share the ip address of lion.itekom.co.za

By the way this is a good way to find out who is visiting your site. Get the ip address from your logs or site stats and then do the look up. Some good stats packages do the look up for you automatically.

You need an unique ip address and unless you deliberately go and seek this you will not get one. If you do not have an unique ip address you will share the ip address with many others and as such your web sites future is unarguably tied to the fortunes of the other components of your shared ip address.

Lets assume for a moment that one of the shared components (another web site you do not even know exists) spams Google and Google bans that ip address then you will by default be banned also and you will not even know it.

As far as my own .co.za addresses are concerned I do not know is how many others which have nothing to do with me have this address. The actual web address by the way corresponding to this ip address is lion.intekom.co.za which belongs to Telkom (Intekom is Internet arm of Telkom) in South Africa

What this all means is that three of my South African web sites are being hosted on this shared server with countless others no doubt. When I first applied for hosting these sites I did not know what I do now. Never again will I use shared ip addresses except for good and sensible reasons for example for sites I do want indexed by a search engine. Such a site might be a simple please pay here site.

It is suspected that unique ip addresses get favourable treatment from search engines but this could be total nonsense. However it does make some sense in so much that links from independent ip addresses are probably more valuable than links from the same ip address same ip address could suggest rigged linking or a form of spamming.