Sharing IP Addresses On Shared Servers Is Normal & Fine For Google Rankings

John Mueller from Google has clarified that sharing IP addresses and having your site on a shared server or using a CDN is normal and fine for SEO and ranking. He reassures that despite common concerns, shared IP addresses are a standard practice due to the limited availability of IPs and do not negatively impact a site's SEO.

According to John Mueller, sharing an IP address with spammy sites is unlikely to harm your site's SEO. He explains that search engines are accustomed to the way CDNs and shared hosting work, which often involves sharing IPs among multiple sites. Even if a reverse IP lookup tool shows that your website shares an IP with many others, including spammy ones, it should not affect your site's reputation for SEO purposes.

CDNs, or Content Delivery Networks, can affect SEO by distributing your site's content across a globally distributed set of datacenters. This means that the IP address associated with your site can change depending on the time and location of the user. However, John Mueller indicates that search engines are adept at handling these changes and that the use of CDNs is a common practice that does not negatively impact SEO.

John Mueller has advised CDNs against blocking Googlebot because if a CDN is set too aggressively in handling bots, it might prevent Googlebot from accessing the site's content. If Googlebot can't crawl the site, then the content won't be indexed, which can severely impact the site's visibility and SEO performance. For instance, he mentioned an issue with Cloudflare where aggressive settings could block Googlebot, leading to indexing problems.