What is having a bad neighbor? Many people are confused about this term. They have heard that having a bad neighbor can hurt their PageRank or even their SERP. But what is a bad neighbor anyway, and how can you tell if you have a bad neighbor?

Think about your server, did you know that some servers may host several websites on the server you are on? If the major of the sights on this server are , your website might be banned on Google. Yup thats right, or be severely punished for it. So the most important thing to know about your server is this. Is your server a dedicated server or a shared server? It is not the domain name of your site but the IP address.

IP addresses are the addresses under which search engines find websites on the Internet. Domain names are only an add-on to the IP addresses.

IP addresses can be shared or dedicated. If you use a shared IP address, there will be many websites that use the same IP address as your website.

If you use a dedicated IP address then your website will be the only site on that address.

1. Search engines might use it in their algorithms

Google will tell you that it doesn't matter whether your website has a dedicated IP address or not. However, most of the web pages that can be found on the first result pages have dedicated IP addresses. That's interesting because the vast majority of domains is hosted on a shared IP address.

2. Shared hosting makes your website slower

If you share an IP address with hundreds of other websites then your website might become very slow. If one of the other websites on the server uses a lot of resources then this will affect your own website.

The web server delivers the web pages in the order it receives the requests. If there are more requests to the other websites on your server, the visitors of your website will have to wait before the server sends them your pages.

3. Your website might be in a bad neighborhood

If your website has the same IP address as websites that sell questionable products then your website might get in trouble. If one of the other websites on the server gets banned on Google then your website might get banned, too.

So how can you tell if you have a dedicated or a shared host? Go here, www.axandra.com/free-online-seo-tool/shared-hosting-check.php type in your domain name and find out what other domains share your IP address.

Okay until next time.