Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
-
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
-
At first I was leaning to disagree. But couldn't find anything to back it up. I know some seo tools have ip address checkers to make sure your in a good ip neighborhood and block. I thought this would fall in the same line as what was originally asked.
"A clean IP address. You might think your site is squeaky clean, but did you know your IP address has a dirty secret? That’s right. Unbeknownst to you, your neighbor is into some very shady things. Check to see if you’re in a bad IP neighborhood by running an IP checker like MXToolbox.com."
The entire post can be found here: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/04/the-seo-bucket-list-3-things-to-do-before-your-site-dies/
So because of these tools checking your ip block I was always under assumption that a shady site on a server could in fact have some impact on your rankings. However I am hard pressed to find any evidence to support this.
Heres another post from above reference:
"About 3% of all web sites "own" a private ip number, with the remainder being on virtual, or name-based, servers. Although only 3% are dedicated ip's, we have seen that in many instances well over 90% of the top-50 results in the search engines are sites having dedicated ip numbers. This was so strange that we have repeatedly validated these findings, and have found that switching a site from a virtual ip to a dedicated ip number alone has caused significant ranking increases. Of course, the web is so dynamic that this could be coincidence, but we do not think so.Likewise, we have found that there are "dirty" ip c-blocks, ranges of ip numbers that have been tarnished by spammers and left to be reassigned to unsuspecting sites. If your site is in the range of the spammers ip, then you are equally penalized. We have likewise found instances where simply moving a site has caused the ranking to improve."
Im glad I came across this post. Learn something new everyday. Did I misunderstand the statement on the above mentioned article or is this perhaps an outdated theory?
Thanks in any event for teaching an old dog something new.
-
Your site should not be affected by other sites hosted by the same provider. Think about huge nationwide hosting sites like GoDaddy - if sharing hosting with websites with questionable content was a problem, a LOT of websites would have a problem!
-
Better still, get your own virtual dedicated server and don't share anything except hardware resources
-
I agree with Highland, but if this is a major site, just pay the extra few dollars to get a dedicated ip address (just in case).
-
What you're talking about would be an IP ban or filter. I've never had anyone prove such a thing exists. At worst, someone hacks a server that is shared hosting dozens of sites and does something to directly attack Google. In that case, I would assume Google would ban the IP from incoming traffic but not from outgoing (like a bot).
Google ranks domains, not IPs. So even if you're shared hosting on the same IP as an adult site, Google won't see your site as related to theirs unless you LINK to them. So your SEO and their SEO are like ships passing in the night, sharing an ocean and nothing else.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking Sub Categories on Ecommerce Site
Hi, I haven't tested this yet, so before I do I wanted to see if anyone had some experience with this. I have lower level categories I want to rank for SEO for example: Say I want to rank 'Standard Metal Lockers' - with the way our site is set up, I have to work within a classification, which isn't always easy. So it would be categorised as follows: Cupboards & Lockers > Lockers > Standard Lockers > Standard Metal Lockers The URL structure would remain /standard-metal-lockers & I would link this from the 'Lockers' page. Is this too deep in the site structure to rank? I think if it's linked properly & promoted it will be fine, but I'd like to see if anyone else has had this issue. Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
Ranking sites in vertical markets with 90% scraped content
Hi, Hoping to get advice about ranking sites (a vertical market search engine/portal like a car site for example) that gets its content from scraping car sites. For various reasons (mostly scale eg cant get car dealers to push their listings to us) content was scraped. The startup has received great press, TV interviews, incubator programs etc, and has also secured very significant investment. I feel if this site was launched pre-panda it would be ranking much better. We have invested significantly in our tech, our search tools and site innovation place us easily as market leader in this space. Anyone with experience in ranking sites with legitimate reasons for using scraped content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edthomasnp0 -
Does duplicate content penalize the whole site or just the pages affected?
I am trying to assess the impact of duplicate content on our e-commerce site and I need to know if the duplicate content is affecting only the pages that contain the dupe content or does it affect the whole site? In Google that is. But of course. Lol
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How can I rank a national site for local terms
Hi All I have a website that covers all parts of the UK and I wish to be found for terms such as "car for sale London" "car for sale Manchester" and so on. In the past I have created separate landing pages for each town and city but with the quality score of a page becoming more of a ranking factor it is hard to make 300 + town pages interesting and useful. Is it best practice to do what I am doing and improve the quality of each of the pages or would I be better off removing the old pages and using some other technique to rank for the local searches? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Can Someone Provide an Example of a Site that Indexes Search Results Successfully?
So, I know indexing search results is a big no-no, but I recently started working with a site that sees 50% of its traffic from search result pages. The user engagement on these pages is very high, and these pages rank well too. Unfortunately, they've been hit by Panda. They already moved the section of the site with search results to a subdomain, and saw temporary success. There must be a way to preserve their traffic from these search result pages and get out from under Panda.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Can you spot the reasons for our site dropping in rankings so significantly?
We've been racking our brains over this since the recent search engine changes (the notorious and non-cuddley Google Panda update) and have, within reason, corrected as many of the problems that we possibly can yet still our traffic drops further. http://www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com used to rank fairly equally with it's competitors however since the update (and a number of suggestions from another SEO company), the traffic has dropped by about 90% and it's dropped almost completely from the search results (unlike the competitors who are breaking many faux-pars yet remain well ranked). I don't think we're seeing the wood from the trees anymore so I'd be grateful if someone could take a look and see if we've missed anything glaringly obvious? Any thoughts welcome. Thanks Tim Big changes around the same time/since that might be worth noting: Setup a canonical domain name of www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com and (using IIS7) 301 redirect all other traffic over. Setup canonical URL meta tag for all results pages so they point to a single page Moved the redirect page (the one which sends users to the B&B's site) to another subdomain. Redesigned the URLs where possible to use "friendlier" and more keyword rich urls and 301 redirecting for the old urls Added XML sitemaps to the various tools (we found out they weren't there before) Added a robots.txt file Lowercased all urls Where possible removed duplicate results pages and pointed them at a single page Restructured the page titles to be more relevant Setup nofollow on the external urls
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimGaunt0 -
Bad neighborhood linking - anyone can share experience how significant it can impact rankings?
SEOMoz community, If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board. While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4) While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site. My question two the community are two-fold: Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word? The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site? Thanks /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0