Bad neighbourhood was once feared by webmasters. Especially when your website is on a shared hosting, there is always the risk of not knowing who else is sharing your IP. It could be a poker site or a porn site, you never know.
But, bad neighbourhood is not something to be scared off. I mean, even if you knew the other guy hosted on your server/ip, by how much can you change it ? Although dedicated IPs are better, not all would afford it so, we have to go for the shared IP.
And there is nothing as scary in SEO because of shared IPs, its okay. Google knows that most of us are on shared IPs and there is nothing one can do to stop the host from sharing the IP with a spam site, other than to move away do dedicated servers.
What might put you in trouble is when you yourself host “spammy” sites on your server and interlink them. Other than bad links from bad neighbourhood pouring into your site, there is nothing much to be afraid of.
However, for the curious kind, who’d love to peek-a-boo into your server and see who else is sharing the IP and server with you, use this cool tool.
This tool will reveal which other sites share the IP with yours. Again, this is just for fun sake, nothing to be scared off. (Just in case you are OCD)
I didn´t even know about this Neigbourhood in the net… Quite interesting though. I like the Axandra tool …
Great post. I´ve checked we are not neighbours. hehe
Rgds
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This was holding back my site. A couple months back I received similar advice from another blog, and I switched to a Virtual Private Server from another host. From there I have had nothing but good SEO fortune.
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I agree. People make far too bigger deal about other websites on their Ips.
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