There has been a lot of discussion in the SEO world about whether Google penalizes websites that share IP addresses with known malware and/or scam websites. While nobody has been able to prove exactly if and how your neighboring websites can affect Google’s opinion of your website, it never hurts to know who else is in your neighborhood.
The good news is that Google provides a free tool that you can use to find out whether your domain has been found to be unsafe and also tell if other unsafe sites have been hosted on the same IP address. How can this happen you ask? Well, most webmasters use a form of web hosting called “shared hosting”. This is the cheapest form of hosting available and it is perfectly sufficient for most users’ needs. On a shared host, many different users are all hosting their sites on the same web server and many will even share the same IP address. So, just because your websites are all clean, it doesn’t mean that all of the other users on that server have clean sites also.
Google allows web users access to the information contained within the Google Safe Browsing tool. This tool will quickly indicate when your site was last tested and if any malware has ever been found on the domain. If you’d like to test your domain with the Safe Browsing tool, simply point your browser to the following address:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=yourdomain.com
Safe Browsing will also show you the networks that have hosted the given domain, which can be seen where the arrow is pointing in the image above. To see other malware websites that are on the same host, simply click on the network name and Google will show you any other domains that have been found on the same network with suspect files.
Like I mentioned before, there is no specific evidence to prove that being in a bad IP neighborhood will hurt your site in the SERPs, but the simple fact that Google performs this analysis gives the “bad neighborhood” theory some credit. If you find that you are hosted on the same IP address as several malware websites or spam sites, you may want to contact your hosting company to see about having your websites moved to a different server or at least a different IP address. That way you can be sure that you won’t be penalized because of the bad websites that others have posted.
