Does IP Blacklist cause SEO issues?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

Our IP was recently blacklisted - we had a malicious script sending out bulk mail in a Joomla installation.

Does it hurt our SEO if we have a domain hosted on that IP?

Any solid evidence?

Thanks.

[Modi]

Who has Blacklisted the IP Address. Is it Joomla forums or Gmail Account

However, as referred in this article :- http://moz.com/ugc/the-penguin-update-how-google-identifies-spam about spam emails

"So what about websites? Wouldn't that knowledge of identifying and classifying spam be shared with the search and webspam teams? Don't you think Matt Cutts has access to Gmail's spam detection data? I bet he does, and I bet some of it is being seen in this Penguin update.

Gmail is a pretty well documented product. You can read up quite a bit on spam filters and how they work. I would recommend this to everyone as we can then get a better idea of what Google sees as spam content. For me the biggest takeaway is that Gmail openly admits to using user data and feedback in classifying and identifying spam. This should be a huge indicator to us all that user data is playing a role in how Google classifies and identifies spam on the web. The trick now is to figure out exactly what user data/feedback is being used."

[Highland]

It's not related to Gmail. The server itself was sending out email spam (Joomla is a CMS program used to manage websites). I bet he means he got listed on Spamhaus.

First off, web spam and email spam are two entirely separate things. So you can be blacklisted with anyone in the email realm and not have it affect your SEO.

Second, I've heard the "blacklisted IP" theory regurgitated for nearly 10 years now and nobody has ever proven that a specific IP was the reason for a site losing ranking. So you could, in theory, share an IP with an entire link farm and not lose any ranking (consider how many blogs share an IP under Wordpress.com or Blogspot). Google surfs the web just like everyone else (using DNS lookups) and they rank domains, not IPs (which are subject to change). The only way I could see an IP getting you in trouble is if your server got hacked and the hacker was using it to proxy attacks against Google (as in DDoS attacks, not spam). Then you might have some issues with SEO but your server being hacked would be a far more serious problem at that point.