As soon as people find out what people at our company do, they usually start to ask questions about what they (or their sister, or their uncle, or some other close friend or relative) can do to increase their visibility on search engines. Some people ask if virtual hosts are penalized on Google. Others ask if template-based website builders—such as ours—produce websites that are search engine friendly. In fact, sometimes we´ve heard these same concerns expressed by our Builder customers.

There are two myths which tend to feed these sorts of concerns, and we’d like to look at them briefly today.

Myth #1: Virtual hosts do not rank as well on Google as dedicated IP addresses
Virtual Hosts vs. Unique IP Addresses

We use Virtual hosting; multiple websites hosted through the same IP address rather than each site having its own. In the eyes of a search engine however, it makes no difference. Virtual hosts are treated by Google in the same way as unique IP addresses. Craig Silverstein, Google´s Director of Technology, said in a 2003 interview: “If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you´ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception.” (Click here for full article.) Matt Cutts, senior engineer at Google, verified that statement in 2006: “I’m happy to affirm that this statement, which was true in 2003, is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.” (Click here for full article.)