This week, we're taking a look at the websites that are hosted on the same server as your website. Are some of them spammers? Does this affect your rankings?

In the news: Google offers more search options, Google might artificially inflate the conversion rate for advertisers, Microsoft's Kumo Search might be on the way and more.

Table of contents:

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news and articles of the week
• Success stories (this could be yours!)
• Previous articles

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Are you living in a bad neighborhood? Your website could. Did you know that your web host probably hosts several websites on the same web server as yours?

Some of these websites might belong to shady businesses. If they are major spammers, your website might be banned on Google.

What's the difference between shared and dedicated IP addresses?

IP addresses are the addresses under which search engines find websites on the Internet. Domain names are only an add-on to the IP addresses.

IP addresses can be shared or dedicated. If you use a shared IP address, there will be many websites that use the same IP address as your website.

If you use a dedicated IP address then your website will be the only site on that address.

Does it make a difference what kind of IP address you have?

Yes. We recommend that you spend the money to get a dedicated IP that hosts only your own domain names. This has several reasons:

1. Search engines might use it in their algorithms

Google will tell you that it doesn't matter whether your website has a dedicated IP address or not. However, most of the web pages that can be found on the first result pages have dedicated IP addresses. That's interesting because the vast majority of domains is hosted on a shared IP address.

2. Shared hosting makes your website slower

If you share an IP address with hundreds of other websites then your website might become very slow. If one of the other websites on the server uses a lot of resources then this will affect your own website.

The web server delivers the web pages in the order it receives the requests. If there are more requests to the other websites on your server, the visitors of your website will have to wait before the server sends them your pages.

3. Your website might be in a bad neighborhood

If your website has the same IP address as websites that sell questionable products then your website might get in trouble. If one of the other websites on the server gets banned on Google then your website might get banned, too.

How to find out which websites are hosted on the same server as your site

Go to the shared hosting check web page and enter your domain name. The free online tool will show you all domains that are hosted on the same server as your website.

If your website does not have a dedicated IP address, call your web host. There might be a small fee for the dedicated IP address but it is worth the charge.

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