Should I get a unique IP?

[rlopes528]

I have a couple sites hosted in a VPS that share the same IP.

Should I assign each site a unique IP? Would Google affect my rankings for a sudden IP change?

[customerparadigm.com]

Ricardo -

While Google usually doesn't have a problem indexing sites with shared IPs, I'd highly recommend each site have it's own IP address.

While it's fine if you're hosting multiple sites on a VPS that share an IP address, long term, you need to worry about things like email blacklisting (if one site starts send out spam) or other issues, too.

I don't think that you'll see any negative implications for rankings if you change the IP address; I'd perhaps set the TTLs in your DNS zone file for the domain down as low as it can go (i.e. 3600 seconds or 1,800 seconds) to prevent users from not seeing the site if they have the older IP address cached on their computer.

Hope this helps...

• Jeff

[DarinPirkey]

Jeff's answer is very good.

I just wanted to add that if your sites link to one another, I would highly recommend having separate IPs and even separate hosting accounts if possible.  Part of Google's patent on rankings are referring domains and the IPs in which those domains are on.  I've personally seen where moving a domain that I own to a different host with a different IP dramatically increased each of the sites rankings.  (this may be just correlation and not necessarily causation but it's worked for other people I've worked with too)

[FedeEinhorn]

I think that now a days, with many sites using reverse proxies (such as CloudFlare) Google has stopped looking at the IPs as it is no longer a factor to rank sites.

Jeff's point on the e-mail problem is right, however, you can simply host your email on a third party IP, like Google Apps, and never get blocked. Something that even dedicated IPs get the punch.

I have a few dedicated servers, some of them with multiple IP addresses and I found myself trying to clean new IP addresses that just were to new or "abused" by previous owners.

Switching hosting provider, however, while changing the IP address may increase/decrease rankings not because of the IP but most likely because of the site speed, which IS something that Google considers to rank sites.