Can Spam Sites Hosted on the Same Shared Server Hurt Your Search Ranks?

If your blog is hosted on a shared server and you fear that the existence of spam websites hosted on the same server might affect your search rankings, there is nothing much to worry about. Acording to Google Engineer Matt cutts, it won’t affect heavily if the number of spam websites is not too high.

Here is what Matt has to say:

Google understands that shared hosting is a normal thing and webmasters can’t really control who else is hosting their websites on the same server or IP address. As for Spammy websites, they often migrate to different servers over the course of time.

Matt suggests that webmasters should check whether or not their website(s) are hosted with a bunch of spam or porn sites on the same server. If the number of spam sites is abnormally high, then it can be a factor as far as search rankings are concerned.

Find Which Domains are Hosted On the Same Shared Server

To check whether your webhost is serving spam sites on the same IP address or server, follow the simple steps mentioned below:

1. Open Windows Command prompt and type ping www.yoursite.com and you will get the IP address of your website.

2. Next open Bing.com and enter ip: xx.xx.xx.xx where XX refers to the IP address of your website.

Bing will then return a list of all the domains who are hosted on the same shared environment. You can then click through some random websites to check whether they are all spam sites or not.

Another good idea would be to perform a reverse IP check using Yougetsignal. Yougetsignal is a useful web service which will perform a reverse IP check and show a list of all domains hosted on the same shared server. The good thing about YougetSignal is that it will highlight a domain if it contains explicit content.

If the number of spam or pornographic websites is too high, you should consider transferring your website to a different hosting provider.