The confusion around dedicated and additional IP addresses for SEO has already reached its early teens as the misconception started some 12 years ago, back in 2003 while Craig Silverstein was Director of Technology at Google. The theory claimed that a dedicated IP address should provide a significant boost to your SEO, and while the myth still lingers somewhere within the ether, we’ll try to explain why you do not need additional IPs for SEO, and we’ll do our best to bust this myth once and for all.

We are all concerned about SEO since any business needs to drive a certain amount of traffic to their webpage, the same way they need visitors to come through their door, no matter how big or small the business or the website is. For anyone looking to gain exposure for their site that’s built on WordPress, it is neither vital nor necessary to have additional or dedicated IP addresses hosting for SEO purposes, as they simply won’t boost their SEO in any way. Even Google says that they will not help your SEO rankings and that there are no justified or legitimate reasons for using additional or dedicated IP addresses for SEO purposes.

The “Multiple Mini-sites” Trend

This was another way to cheat and boost the SEO. Namely, the companies would create multiple mini-sites (sometimes even 50 or more) with unique, but closely-themed content in order to flood the search results with as many of their own web properties as they possibly could. Now, each of these pages had its own domain name and needed to be hosted separately. This generated the fear of being busted and getting penalized by the search engines, thus webmasters realized they could look for unique C-class IP hosting via which they would be able to assign multiple different IP addresses. This would create an illusion of their mini-sites network not being related to each other. Since this was clearly cheating, Google managed to catch almost all culprits sooner or later, and they consequently got de-ranked.

No Way Around

Whatever you do, you still need good SEO, there’s simply no way around it, and the best way to have good SEO is not to stray from the safe side. One must be able to provide interesting and relevant content for their target audience. Any SEO tweaking before having potent and significant content on your website would be premature and in vain. Once you’ve taken good care of that, you will want a reliable managed WordPress host, so your site’s speed will have an upper hand over your potential competition.

SEO Conclusion

Although there is no tangible advantage to having a dedicated IP address just for SEO purposes, there are certain benefits when it comes to eCommerce. If you happen to run a shopping cart that requires an SSL certificate, you may need a dedicated IP since your host would most likely assign a dedicated IP address to your webpage due to security reasons. Your customer’s data carried on each transaction can be quite susceptible to potential breaches, which can bring along many security issues. And nobody wants those.

With Crucial, you won’t need a dedicated IP for SSL’s as we run SNI on our servers, this gives you the ability to run multiple certificates on an IP.