Add Private IP for better Search Engine rankings

How a dedicated IP address affects your search engine rankings

Every online business uses a hosting company which assigns an IP address, be it a “dedicated or shared hosting IP address.”

There are two types of IP addresses in the web hosting industry and they are:

  • Shared IP address: this means there are numerous websites sharing the same address. The hosting server determines which website is requested by the URL entered.
  • Dedicated IP address: this means a website has its own IP address. Typing in the URL of the website or its IP address would bring you to the same website.

Mind you, there are controversies around dedicated IP addresses for SEO and questions around whether a dedicated IP address would actually boost rankings.

The truth is, a dedicated IP address from your hosting company would not boost your SEO but increase website loading speed, which is a criterion for SEO (Google and Bing) in 2016.

So a dedicated IP can result in an increase in site’s speed which equals good SEO for your website.

Benefits of using a dedicated IP address

The benefits of using a dedicated IP address can be found below:

  • Having your own private SSL certificate: Google made having an SSL Certificate a ranking factor for websites looking to rank for keywords in Google search engine results. Google crawlers have been designed to index a site with the SSL certificate and favor websites using HTTPS.
  • Enhanced performance and security: for websites attracting huge web traffic, a dedicated IP address would be the best bet, as a shared hosting IP address would be used by thousands of other websites resulting in constant server crash and website downtime (my experience with Namecheap), making your website unreachable to visitors thereby losing SEO juice.

Key takeaway

Having a dedicated IP address for your hosting server would increase your website speed, provide enhanced performance and security (access to an SSL Certificate).