Can IP neighbours hurt your site?

[Ceres]

I was reading an article on Beer Monies that talks about IP neighbours. The author states that all his/her sites were getting sandboxed:

I did a IP neighbors check on one of my old sites to see what all else was in there. What I noticed was a lot of garbage. Pure garbage everywhere? It seems everyone loves these $10 hosting accounts and just uses them for affiliate sites and spam. I didn?t see 1 legit looking site on my entire server with them

After transferring from Hostgator to a new hosting account, the author states:

My site is now ranked #1 for my term overnight. I few other things happened to this domain so its hard to tell right now which one caused my site to go from sandbox to #1 but I think it was the hosting move.

Do you know if it's true that Google treats your site differently depending on who your IP neighbours are?

You can check who your IP neighbours are here.

[abhishekjha]

one more interesting fact i would like to put here is that if you host with a cheap based company then there are chances that your ip is blocked by some isps, so due to that the countries whose isp's have blocked the ip of that hosting company, their residents wont be able to access your site at all, without using a proxy server.

also, some hosting providers block certain countries like china, so even if their isp didnt block your server but your server blocked it then residents of that country couldnt access your site at all.

so in both cases above you loose potential visitors to your site, so always choose a hosting provider which doesnt block a country and whose ip addresses arent blocked by some isps of some countries.

[hosting]

In additional to what Abhishejha mentioned.

Assuming you are in a shared hosting environment, it may happen that you have more than one site offering similar products. Google picks up the fist one and gives the rank rest all similar or duplicate contents on the same ip get penalized, ignored or not ranked.

[Ceres]

Originally Posted by abhishekjha

so always choose a hosting provider which doesnt block a country and whose ip addresses arent blocked by some isps of some countries.

Thanks Abhishek. How do we find out if certain IP addresses are being blocked by ISPs of certain countries?

Originally Posted by hosting

Assuming you are in a shared hosting environment, it may happen that you have more than one site offering similar products. Google picks up the fist one and gives the rank rest all similar or duplicate contents on the same ip get penalized, ignored or not ranked.

hosting, thanks for the info. If the "similar" sites were all using different hosts, would the same thing happen?

[hosting]

Yes. if the contents are the same they will all get penalized. But there is a way you can trick the spider to avoid crawling your site with the same content. This can be done by using different META tags. This topic is beyond this thread and to difficult to explain. I have done lot of searching, reading source code of the PR sites to understand this. I am not an SEO expert but if you know you can trick the spider you can be at the top ;-)

[Ceres]

Thanks hosting! I probably wouldn't ever risk trying to trick the spiders, as I assume if you get caught, your site ends up facing the consequences. In any event, it's good to understand tactics other sites might be using.

[hosting]

Originally Posted by Ceres

Thanks hosting! I probably wouldn't ever risk trying to trick the spiders, as I assume if you get caught, your site ends up facing the consequences. In any event, it's good to understand tactics other sites might be using.

Sorry if "trick" meant really a trick/cheat. Well this is ONE of the official/legal way to do that. Assuming your content is duplicate and you do not want the spider to crawl the content, so to avoid this you put some meta tags along with the contents. This way you are telling the spider to look for the contents ONLY IN THE META TAGS and not to crawl the site for the content.

THIS IS ONE OF THE OFFICIAL WAY and IT IS ACCEPTABLE.

I am sure there are other wesbite designers/developers, SEO experts in the forum would agree with this too, that's a different story if they would or wouldn't like to share their knowledge and experience ;-)

The topic is too vast and is very difficult to discuss here.