A webmaster can host his or her website on a regular web host, and the potential to rank high in the major search engines is the same as it would be on an SEO host.
If a webmaster wants to host a single website and try to rank it in the search engines, a unique IP address is not really helpful.
As long as the other websites on the same IP block are not engaging in shady activities, there is really nothing to worry about, and a website has every opportunity to get ranked highly by search engines.
Since it has already been established that search engines do look at the IP address that a website is on, it’s important to understand why.
Currently, the top search engine is Google, and the algorithms that are used by this company look at hundreds of different factors.
When these algorithms are deciding where to rank a website, one of the factors that they take into consideration is how many links the website has pointing at it.
However, the algorithms also check to see if the websites linking to the original site are on unique IP addresses.
If a website has multiple links pointing at it from multiple websites that are on the same IP block, only the first link helps the website to rank higher in the search engines.
Google doesn’t give all of the other links as much weight as the first link from any given IP block. A lot of businesses have a network of websites, which are all legitimate, and the business might wish to interlink all of the websites in their network because it can help each website to rank better.
This is really the only way a unique IP address would be useful. Most SEO hosts are advertising to webmasters who plan on hosting a single website, and since these webmasters don’t have a network of websites that they wish to interlink, there is no point in paying the additional money for one or more unique IP address.
Another Potential Problem
There is another problem with SEO hosting. A lot of webmasters purchase domains that have expired, and they use these websites to boost the search engine rankings of other websites that they own. Google refers to this practice as a link scheme, and while it’s quite obvious that link networks produce results, they make SEO extremely risky.
The fact that a web host actually calls itself an SEO host is a huge red flag, and there is a lot of speculation as to whether or not the major search engines are automatically reducing the rankings of websites that are hosted on so-called SEO hosts.
If this is really happening, an unsuspecting webmaster could be considered guilty by association, even if he or she never had any plans of using a link scheme, and for this reason, it’s probably better to go with a web host that doesn’t advertise as being an SEO host.
At the end of the day, it’s quite safe to say that SEO hosting is a gimmick. Even for individuals who plan on setting up a link scheme, the risk of using an SEO host would seem too great for the potential reward.