I receive a lot of trackbacks (see what are trackbacks) to my various websites each day. In WordPress, it’s extremely easy to select them all and approve them all at once without having to check them out first because you think to yourself “hey new instant link juice!”.

IP Address SEO

Before you do so, check out their IP addresses which appears for each domain underneath the domain name as you don’t want dozens of links coming from the same IP address.

IP addresses play a role in SEO and it’s one of the Google ranking factors. IP addresses can tell a search engine the network and host of a domain, so you can identify the origin of a site and consequently its links on geographical and other levels.

Consequently, Google and other search engines use investigate IP addresses as one of their methods for assigning link value. They do this because they can use IP address identification to identify where links to a particular site are coming from. Link diversity is very important, and you want to get links from as many different IP addresses as possible.

This shows:

-That you’re not creating tons of links from your own sites to your own sites. Search engines hate any kind of manipulation to get a website to rank highly throughout unnatural means. If you’re linking to your own site over and over again from another site which you own, this appears VERY unnatural as it’s likely that the links are all coming from the same or a very similar IP address. This can get your rankings penalized.

-That you’re not receiving links from the same IP addresses over and over again. This is similar to the first point in that search engines also don’t want you receiving lots of links from the same location over and over again. Even if it’s not your site, if you’re only receiving hundreds and thousands of links from a select few sites, it appears as if you’re manipulating the search engines yet again.

-That lots of unique domains and webmasters are linking to your site from theirs; this is an indication that you’ve got good content which is worth ranking highly.

One more IP address SEO factor which you may not have as much control over is that if your website is hosted on a similar IP address to sites which host a lot of spammy content, you’ll may find that you have taken a hit in your own rankings or have been banned by proxy, rare as this is (see hosting and SEO for more information).

Going one step further, any links which you receive from a site which is hosted on a similar IP as a site or sites which host a lot of spammy content may not end up hurting you, but they likely won’t offer very much link juice.