Thu, 18 Nov 2004
Some web hosting customers, especially those with dubious business plans who
have hired SEO witch
doctors, request that every web site be placed on a separate IP address. The
theory is that Google is likely to discount the links between sites on the same
IP address because such sites may be trying to artificially increase their PageRank. It would be silly for
Google to do this since there could be hundreds or thousands of unrelated sites
that share an IP address, simply because they are customers of the same web
hosting company. Nonetheless, this seems to be a widely-held belief.
This is frustrating to those in the hosting business because IP(v4) addresses
are a finite resource, and here in North America, requests for new IP addresses
for IP-based web hosting must include a technical
justification.
Today, Sean emailed Google to ask for
clarification. I hope that Google will publicly state that using multiple IP
addresses cannot be used to inflate PageRank.
Update (Thu, 09 Dec 2004): Google responds by saying, go ask someone else to speculate.
Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 14:33:35 -0800
From: help@google.com
Subject: Re: [#17061378] Regarding the need for a static IP Address
Hi Sean,
Thank you for writing to us. Please note that we don't comment on
webmaster techniques or the details of our search technology beyond what
appears on our site.
We've dedicated an entire section of our site to answering the most common
questions from those who maintain and/or promote websites. You'll find all
of our publicly available information posted at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html
Besides this section of our site, we've created a newsgroup discussion
forum for passionate Google users. At http://groups.google.com in the
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general group,
many webmasters and Google users share their questions and expertise.
We recommend performing an advanced search on this group if you feel your
question is particularly challenging and you've been unable to find an
answer on our site. To do so, go to
http://www.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl=en and enter your search
terms in one of the 'Find messages' fields at the top of the page. Type
'google.public.support.general' in the 'Newsgroup' search field, and click
'Google Search.' If you don't find an answer to your question, you can
always post your question to the group to see if other newsgroup users
have helpful advice. Please be aware that this content isn't posted by
Google, and we cannot verify its accuracy.
Regards,
The Google Team
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