Whenever you create a website or a blog it usually can be accessed either through “http://www.domain.com” or “http://domain.com”. While this feature might appear useful at a first sight (since people can type whatever version they prefer) over the long run it will harm your search engine ranking.

The problem arises because Google and other search engines view the two versions as two distinct sites, even if they have the exact same content (technically, in fact, the “www” denotes a subdomain that could point to different content).

Search engine ranking is based, among other things, on the number of incoming links to your site. If you keep the two versions available some people will link to “http://www.domain.com” while other people will link to the “http://domain.com”, basically splitting your backlink count.

Having two different versions might damage you in popular lists and social bookmarking sites as well. The picture on the right was extracted from Populicious, a site that lists the most popular sites on Delicious. If you take a look you will notice that Digg is listed both at the 7th and 10th position. This happens because the list treats “http://www.digg.com” and “http://digg.com” as two different sites. Shoud only one version be available the combined number would place Digg on the first position of the list.

How do you solve the problem for your blog? The easiest way is to set up a “301 Permanent Redirect” from the “no-www” version to the one with “www”, or vice-versa. Once the redirect is in place every time a visitor types http://domain.com he will automatically be redirected to the “www” version.

By the way, if you are wondering whether you should go with or without “www”, it does not matter. The important thing is that you pick one and stick with it.

Update: Check out the article “How to setup a 301 Redirect“

One of the best things you can do to improve your blog is buy your own domain. Free blog platforms like Blogger are fine to get a first contact with the blogosphere, but as soon as you decide that you will invest time in your blog I highly recommend that you buy a domain.

Once you decide to buy a domain you will need to search for domains that are not registered yet, but where exactly should you go? Below I will list 3 useful services for someone looking for domain names.

Who.is: you type the domain name and the server will check the availability with most of the extensions (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, .tv and so on). The advantage of this service is that, if the domain is already registered, it will also display the details of the registration (date, registrant, company, etc.).

Instant Domain Search: this site checks the availability of .com, .net and .org domains only. The advantage is that it reports the results in real time. As you type the domain you will see whether it is free or not, letter by letter.

Domains Bot: if you are having trouble finding a suitable domain this service will certainly help you. All you need to do is type one or more keywords and it will generate hundreds of suggestions.

If you ever tried to register some domain names you probably know how difficult it is to find something that has not been registered yet. You start with an idea for a cool website (excitement), then you narrow down a couple of keywords (more excitement) and suddenly “Damn! Who the heck registered that already!” (anger)…

One of the most effective ways to find a free domain name that is relevant to your site is to grab a keyword and add prefixes or suffixes to it, until you find something unique. Suppose you want to launch a blog about marketing, all you have to do is pick the word marketing and start adding prefixes like “emarketing.com”, “promarketing.com”, “polimarketing.com” or suffixes like “marketingspot.com”, “marketingvox.com” or “marketingpulse.com”.

Below you will find more than 200 prefixes and suffixes, so just grab your keyword and run through the list, sooner or later you will find some unique combination that no one has registered yet. Good luck!

Update: If you like this list, consider purchasing my book “Killer Domains.” It has an even bigger list with over 400 prefixes ans suffixes, and many tools and techniques to find good domain names.

Classic suffixes:

• house
• central
• point
• home
• place
• garden
• site
• spot
• park
• dome
• bay
• web
• net
• cave
• base
• heaven
• portal
• world
• camp
• network
• county
• street
• city
• alley
• depot
• valley

Other suffixes:

• now
• resources
• tools
• source
• review
• system
• book
• guide
• talk
• data
• vision
• load
• box
• focus
• beat
• voice
• share
• cafe
• nexus
• zone
• sight
• link
• lab
• insight
• vine
• board
• flow
• signs
• network
• wire
• cast
• ville
• nation
• egg
• cove
• news
• today
• future
• fun
• watch
• story
• fever
• coast
• side
• road
• heat
• bite
• insider
• club
• connect

Classic prefixes:

• the
• my
• i
• me
• we
• you
• e
• top
• pro
• best
• super
• ultra
• all
• cyber
• simply
• free
• 1st

Other prefixes:

• meta
• re
• metro
• urban
• head
• hit
• front
• techno
• ever
• rush
• think
• solo
• radio
• vip

Adjectives that can be used as prefixes:

• hot
• smart
• cool
• hot
• fast
• fresh
• sleek
• first
• daily
• best
• sharp
• light
• classic
• fast
• great
• quick

Latin prefixes:

• ubi (when)
• bis (twice)
• ad (to, towards)
• ambi (both)
• inter (between)
• liber (free)
• mono (single)
• poli (many)
• tele (distant)
• omni (all)
• exo (outside)
• extra (addition)
• hyper (over)
• hypo (under)
• intro (within)
• proto (first)
• intra (within)
• micro (little)
• macro (large)
• multi (many)
• neo (new)
• iso (equal)
• mono (one)

Latin words that can be used both as prefix and suffix:

• io (I in Italian)
• virtus (virtue)
• ego (me)
• vox (voice)
• ex (out of)
• ideo (idea)
• novo (renew)
• novus (novelty)
• pax (peace)
• rex (king)
• velox (fast)
• verus (true)
• vivo (alive)
• nova (new)

Multipliers prefixes:

• pico
• nano
• micro
• milli
• kilo
• mega
• giga
• tera
• peta

Scientific prefixes:

• aero
• cosmo
• deca
• eco
• geo
• hex
• oxy
• uni
• poly

Words that work both as prefix and suffix:

• media
• direct
• access
• ez
• easy
• info
• interactive
• biz
• buzz
• bit
• byte
• up
• tech
• on
• out
• auto
• pulse
• x
• venture
• trend
• life
• retro
• secret

Sometime ago I wrote an article titled “WWW or no-WWW“ where I explained that most sites can be accessed either through “http://www.domain.com” or “http://domain.com”. Leaving both domain versions working is not optimal because it might split your backlink count and consequently damage your search engine rankings.

Apart from setting a “301 Redirect” you can also use a Google featured called Webmaster Tools to inform Google about what domain version you prefer. This will make sure that Google handles the backlink count correctly and also that the right version will be displayed on search results.

Here is a quote from Google’s help center:

The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results. Once you tell us your preferred domain name, it may help us determine PageRank for your site more accurately.

Via: John Chow

SEOmoz has has a great list of rules to follow when coming up with domain names, check it out:

1. Brainstorm 5 Top Keywords
2. Make the Domain Unique
3. Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains
4. Make it Easy to Type
5. Make it Easy to Remember
6. Keep the Name as Short as Possible
7. Create and Fulfill Expectations
8. Avoid Copyright Infringement
9. Set Yourself Apart with a Brand
10. Reject Hyphens and Numbers
11. Don’t Follow the Latest Trends
12. Use an Ajax Domain Selection Tool

Most of those rules are straight forward, but you can read a complete description of them here.

Domain tasting refers to the practice of registering up several domain names to test whether they receive type-in traffic and then dropping the domains that do not. This is possible because most domain registrars offer a 5 days refunding period.

This practice should not affect the general public, but lately people are reporting that some domain search data is being sold to domain tasting companies. In other words, when you search for a certain domain someone might be collecting that information and selling it, possibly making you lose that domain.

The DailyDomainer has an interesting article titled “Who is monitoring your domain searches?“, outlining how domain tasting work and how one could protect himself against it. There are three simple tips to avoid losing a precious domain to tasters:

1. Delay the search for domains until you are ready to purchase them
2. If one of your searched domains gets registered by a domain taster you should wait 5 days and check for availability again (make sure to not visit the domain during that period)
3. If you are in doubt about several domains buy them all, choose and then drop the ones that you will not use

Sometime ago I wrote the article “How to Choose a Blog Name“ where I described three simple rules that you should follow when naming your blog. On the third rule I argued that a blog name should be equal to the domain name or else you will lose readers along the way.

When people come to your blog through a search engine or through a link on another blog they will read the blog name and go straight to the content. Should those people want to return to your blog after a certain time they will just type the blog name followed by a .com, and if they do not find the blog there it is probable that they will just forget about it and move on.

Apart from making the blog name match the domain name, however, you should also pay attention to the domain extension. As I mentioned before most people are used to .com domains, whenever they need to type something they will always try first the .com. Not everyone has a .com domain for their blog, though. A simple solution to avoid losing readers if you have a .net or .org extension, for instance, is to add the extension to your blog name or logo.

If you have the domain “techblog.com” you should name your blog “Tech Blog”. If on the other hand you have “techblog.net” or “techblog.tv” you should name your blog or design your logo as “TechBlog.net” and “TechBlog.tv” respectively. This simple tweak will ensure that readers will remember the extension of your domain if they decide to revisit the blog in the future.

Domain names are the real estate of the Internet, and domainers make money from buying, parking and selling them. Even if you are not trying to make a living from domain names it is always a good idea to know how they work. You might want to start another blog in the future and thus having a small portfolio of good domains could turn out to be useful.

Aviva published an extensive article titled “How to Get Started as a Domainer” describing domain buying strategies, best practices, how to monetize domains and so on. Below you will find some takeaways from the article:

• If you are trying to make money with domains look for keyword typos (e.g. Mortgeges.com)
• Consider using automated domain research tools like AjaxWhois.com
• If you are holding domains for long periods make sure to activate the auto renew
• Avoid numbers and hyphens on domain names
• Be careful with domain pinchers (people that register domains using information from whois services) and thieves
• In order to monetize your domains you can either park them or redirect them to a single traffic collector site running your own PPC ads

Most web hosting plans offer a free domain name registration for new users. People usually take advantage of that feature since it enables them to save some money while keeping both the domain name and the hosting plan with the same company, which should make the site management more efficient.

Well, that is not quite true. In fact it is just the opposite, having your domain name registered with your hosting company might be a really bad idea. Over the years it is very likely that you will need or want to change your web host, you might find a more interesting plan somewhere else or you might need to switch to a dedicated server due to increasing traffic. If your hosting company is also managing your domain name they might give you a headache before performing the required changes on the nameservers (i.e. making the domain point to the new host).

The solution for this problem is to keep all your domains names registered with a reliable registrar (GoDaddy and eNom are good ones) while having a separated company to take care of the web hosting. Apart from avoiding trouble with nameserver changes and domain transfers this method will also be more efficient to manage your portfolio of domain names.

In the early days of the Internet when a domain name expired it was already available for other people to register it. Nowadays the process is more complex; the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) created what is called “Grace Period” to protect the registrants.

The Daily Domainer blog has an interesting article titled “Expired – But Not Gone” describing the process in detail. Basically once a domain expires it enters into the “Auto Renew Grace Period”. This period usually lasts 30 days and the owner of the domain is able to renew anytime during that time frame. Should the owner fail to renew the domain it will enter into the Redemption period.

The registrar becomes the owner of the domain on this period, and it will try to sell the domain through auctions or retain it in the case it generates PPC revenues. Finally if the domain is not sold through an auction and if it is also not generating revenues the registrar will release it.

Recently I renewed the domain DailyBlogTips.com for 5 years. It did cost me $50, and it was the first time I renewed a domain for longer than 1 year. Why did I do that?

I had heard many comments around the SEO sphere mentioning that Google and other search engines were monitoring the expiration date of domains in order to evaluate the legitimacy of the websites. Then, a couple of days ago, I came across the following quotation from a patent that Google filled some years ago:

Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

That alone should make people think twice about renewing important domains for just 1 year. If you then consider that you will probably keep these domains for many years anyway, and that a longer renewal will also keep away the risk of losing your domains upon the expiration date, well, you realize that you probably should do it.

As with most SEO aspects, no one has a definite answer regarding how Google is treating the matter. Other than an upfront money payment, however, renewing your domain for longer periods does not have any negative sides, while it might have positive ones, so I guess it is worth it!

When I saw the domain name of Kevin Rose’s newest venture, Pownce.com, I thought that maybe I should buy some short albeit weird domains myself.

Anyway, after researching a bit I managed to find two interesting tools for that purpose. The first one is dyyo.com, a search engine that will help you find 4 letter domain names.

Some time ago I even started looking for 2 and 3 letter domain names, only to discover that they were all gone… so 4 letter is as short as you can go.

According to the tool there are approximately 28,000 4 letter domain names still available. Most of them are unpronounceable words like bqhj.com or pqhn.com, and that is where the tool comes handy. You can specify letters for each position, so just stick some vowels in there, hoping to come up with something useful.

The second tool is 5letter.com, and as you probably guessed it can be used to find 5 letter domain names. Here you create a fragment and specify if the domain name should begin with that frament, end with it, or merely contain it.

For example, if I specify domains to begin with the fragment “po” I get the following names:

• pozzr.com
• pobie.com
• pokoz.com
• podrr.com

We all know that .com domains are the best option, but it is also difficult to find good ones that have not been registered yet. The alternative is to register a .net or .org domain.

There are many popular blogs that are not hosted on .com domains, so if that is your case do not get discouraged. One thing that you should do, however, is to add your domain extension into the name and logo of your site.

The logic is quite simple. Suppose your domain is “coolwebsite.net”, but the name and the logo of the site both display only “CoolWebsite”. A visitor coming from another blog or from a search engine will pay attention to the name and logo, while neglecting the URL. Should that visitor want to visit your site the day after, it is likely that he will just open his browser and type “coolwebsite.com”, and if your site is not there he will just go somewhere else.

If your logo displays “CoolWebsite.net”, on the other hand, there is a higher chance that the user will recall the domain extension. If you do not own a .com domain, therefore, you should attach your extension to your name and incorporate it into your brand.

Want some practical examples? Check the three headers below, they come from popular blogs using this technique:

Domain names are the real estate of the Internet. Just as a good location is vital for a bricks and mortar business, a good domain name will be the corner stone of your website’s success. But how to identify them? Below you will find the 7 characteristics of good domain names.

1. They are short

Good domain names are short. It is not a coincidence that all the three-letter and four-letter .com domains are already gone, and that the five-letter ones are going fast as well.

There is no definite number of characters that you should aim for, just remember that the shorter the better. If you really need some guidance, try to go below 10 characters, and never exceed 20.

As for the number of words, one-word domains are gold, two-word ones are good, three-word domains are average, and above that it is usually a bad idea.

Example: Quotes.com is a superb domain and probably worth millions of dollars. ProQuotes.com is a good two-word domain worth thousands of dollars. ProQuotesNow.com is an average domain and could be used for a website. YourProQuotesNow.com is plain worthless.

2. They are easy to remember

Many Internet users do not use bookmarks. They just memorize the domains of their favorite websites and type them whenever they wan to visit one. Guess what, if your domain is complex and not easy to remember you will lose these visitors along the way.

Example: Brcwr.com is a short domain name, but is not easy to remember at all, so it would be a bad idea to use it for your website (unless the initials represent the name of the website or a memorable message).

3. They are easy to spell

The last thing you want is visitors misspelling your domain and ending up somewhere else.

Avoid unusual foreign words, words that have complex pronunciation, strange combinations of letters and anything else that might cause someone to misspell your address.

Example: CappuccinoBar.com might be problematic for English speaking visitors. Cappuccino is an Italian word, and not everyone is aware where the doubles are placed.

4. They have a .com extension

Organizations might prefer to register a .org domain, and companies targeting very specific geographical regions might want to register a local domain (e.g. .it, .co.uk, .cn and so on). Apart from these cases, however, a .com domain is always the best way to go. This extension is the most popular around the around, and it is already stuck in people’s mind.

Visitors coming to your site via search engines or organic links will pay attention mostly to the name and not to the URL. The next time they want to visit your site it is very likely that they will just type its name followed by a .com. Guess what, if you are not there when they hit enter they will just go somewhere else.

Example: Darren Rowse created his popular blog on Problogger.net. Despite having a strong brand, some visitors were still going to Problogger.com. After a couple of years Darren decided to buy the .com version for $5,000 and redirect it to his site, so that no more visitors would leak.

5. They are descriptive

Many visitors will come to your site through the search engines and via direct links on other websites. That is, they will come if the domain that they will see will be appealing.

Having a descriptive domain name will give visitors an idea of what your site is about even before they enter it. If related keywords are present in the domain it might also help your search engine rankings.

Example: You would be able to guess what TelevisionGuides.com is about even before visiting it right?

Put it in another way. Suppose you are searching for a movie review. You make a quick search in Google. The first result comes from MikesLair.com. The second result comes from MoviesCentral.com. Which one would you rather click?

6. Or brandable

A brandable domain will have a nice pronunciation, an interesting combination of letters or simply an appealing visual effect. Sometimes they will not be descriptive, but they can be equally efficient.

Brandable domains will make your visitors associate the name with your website and its content. (Notice that brandable domains can be descriptive at the same time, but that is not always the case.)

Example: Kotaku.com is one of the most popular gaming blogs on the Internet. The domain is not descriptive at all, but the brand is so strong that gamers immediately recognize it across the web.

7. They don’t contain hyphens or numbers

Domain names containing hyphens and numbers are cheaper for a reason. They suffer the same problem of domains not using a .com extension or with complex spelling.

Consider Tech-World.com. The names that will stick in people’s mind are “tech” and “world.” Many visitors will just forget the hyphen along the way. Eventually they will try to access your site by typing TechWorld.com, in vain.

Numbers, on the other hand, will confuse people with the spelling. Suppose you registered Tech5.com. Visitors might mix it with TechFive.com, if they manage to remember the number in the first place!

Example: Coolest-Gadgets.com is an extremely popular gadget blog, with over 70,000 RSS subscribers. With such a huge readership you get people often typing the domain directly on the address bar. Needless to say that many of them would just forget to add the hyphen. The owner of the site bought CoolestGadgets.com afterwards to fix the problem.

Final remark

Do not get discouraged if your current domain doesn’t have all these characteristics; or if you can’t find one that does. These are just factors that you should consider when evaluating domain names.

There are plenty of examples of popular websites with domain names that lack in one or two points covered on the list. Just make sure that your domain has most of the characteristics and you should be fine.

Update: If you are looking for a domain names ebook, check out “Killer Domains.” It has all the tools and techniques that I use to find great and available domain names.

The DomainTools blog is reporting that Google will be changing its Adsense policy related to domain names. Basically they will prohibit the use of Adsense on domain names that are less than five days old.

This will probably affect many companies that used to taste domains on a large scale. Right now you can register a domain and delete it within five days at no cost. Registrar and other companies, therefore, used to register millions of domain names purely for the sake of “tasting” them. They would then put Adsense on the domains, make a good money for the initial five days, keep the domains that were generating decent traffic and delete all the rest.

This practice is part of the reason why you probably have a hard time finding free domain names. Without the financial incentive, though, it is likely that many domain tasters will need to revise their strategy.

The new policy from Google alone will not solve the problem — since registrars might keep tasting domains purely to see the ones that generate high traffic — but it sure represents a move in the right direction.

Now we just need to hope that the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will take notice and act to stop this practice altogether, possibly by adding a fee to the tasted domains that are deleted within the grace period.

Update: If you are looking for a domain names ebook, check out “Killer Domains.” It has all the tools and techniques that I use to find great and available domain names.

GoDaddy is the registrar of several of my domain names. While I do think that their web hosting is crap, so far they have performed well as a registrar.

That being said, it looks like other people are not having the same luck with their services lately. Yesterday Mashable covered the story of a website that was suspended by GoDaddy due to “suspicious activity.”

Browsing around the web I also came across a website called NoDaddy, which is dedicated to report horror stories from users that got damaged by the company. Here is a quote from the homepage:

GoDaddy suspends accounts without due cause. They often even levy an arbitrary “fines” and hold your domain name ransom until you pay it. GoDaddy stores your credit card number when you make a purchase, allowing them to levy “fines” without your consent (example1, example2, example3).

For example, when Nick Berlette exposed a serious security hole in the website of DynaDot.Com, they apparently responded by persuading GoDaddy to shut down his blog rather than fixing their pathetic security [agiorlando.com]. GoDaddy of course complied immediately, and sent him this shutdown notice. Note that GoDaddy used the ransom approach here, saying he had two options: Pay a “$199 non-refundable reactivation fee” and GD will put his web site back up, or “if you choose to transfer the berlettefx.com domain name to another registrar, we first require that you pay a $75 administration fee … to cover the costs of responding to or “cleaning up” the situation caused by your web site.

Well, if nothing else I will be more careful from now on. GoDaddy should do its homework though, having such a bad publicity circulating around must cost big bucks, especially on the age of blogs and social media (NoDaddy was on the Delicious front page today indeed).

What registrar do you use? Have you had any problems with it in the past?

Update: If you are looking for a domain names ebook, check out “Killer Domains.” It has all the tools and techniques that I use to find great and available domain names.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing around TechCrunch when I came across some articles that were listing web startups that would be participating on a Demo event.

The idea about getting startups grouped together to demonstrate what they products or services can do is pretty interesting, but that was not what caught my attention. Instead, I could not help but think about how bad some of these domain names were. Here are a few examples:

• Webmynd.com (browsing history tracker)
• Insoshi.com (social network platform)
• Omnisio (video sharing)
• Wundrbar (improved search)
• Qrimp.com (web apps)
• Gwt-ext.com (widget library)
• Twitxr.com (picture sharing)
• Yokld.com (local business finder)

I mean, Wundrbar.com? Gwt-ext.com? For real?

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that all my websites have awesome domain names. Even DailyBlogTips is a pretty average one; it is long and has 3 words. There is one big difference though: when I started these sites I had no clue of where I was going, and my startup budget was $10.

These companies, on the other hand, are trying to revolutionize their segments; to provide some innovative service that will become popular on the Internet. Usually they also have thousands of dollars backing them up (sometimes even millions of dollars…).

When I come across some of these names I get the impression that the company sent its secretary to ajaxwhois.com and told her to play around until she came out with a “cool” domain that was still available.

The takeaway message is: if you are going to launch a web startup, make sure to devote some of your time and money into finding or purchasing a good domain name. You will be stuck with it for the rest of the life of the company, after all.

Update: If you are looking for a domain names ebook, check out “Killer Domains.” It has all the tools and techniques that I use to find great and available domain names.

All right let’s put this straight: if you read Daily Blog Tips regularly, there are good chances that one day you will become a web celebrity. If that is the case, you should register YourName.com before someone else does.

Now jokes apart, even if you just blog for hobby, I think it would be a wise idea to secure YourName.com. You never know what might happen in the future, what direction your career might take and so on, and for $9, registering your name on the Internet should definitely be worth it.

Take for example my situation. Right now I have no time whatsoever to start another project, even a small personal blog one. I am pretty sure that in the future I will want to share my personal opinions on different issues though, and perhaps even blog about topics like productivity or personal development. For that purpose I bought DanielScocco.com a while ago, and will just park it until I get the time or will to develop something on it.

Depending on your professional field, you could also use a website as a resume, and YourName.com is definitely the right domain for such a site.

Finally, owning YourName.com also reduces the chances of someone googling your name and finding the website of someone else. Google ergo sum is what they say. So what are you waiting for?

So now it is official. I was hoping the ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) would have enough common sense to discard this proposed regulation, but they approved it yesterday.

Basically it allows any person or company willing to spend $100,000 and with enough infrastructure to become a registrar, to create any domain extension it likes. That is right, ANY DOMAIN EXTENSION will now be possible.

Some examples I am sure people are already rallying to get include .sex, .porn, .orgy, .girls, .casino, .poker and so on. You get the idea.

Honestly I think this will be a huge mess, and the only motivator for ICANN to approve it was probably the money that they will be able to make thanks to the porno domain name industry and from companies wanting to secure their own extension.

Over at TechCult we started an initiative to fund TechCult.Shuttlecock .

Do you think it is better to have a shared or fixed IP address?

I confess that I didn’t know the answer right out of my head, so I went to research a bit. What I knew was that a shared IP is what you get most of the times when you sign for a shared hosting plan, and that usually you can get a static (also called fixed or dedicated) IP for a domain adding a couple of bucks to the monthly deal.

Under a shared IP address structure all the sites inside a server will have the same IP, say 212.90.80.130. Once a browser requests a page from a site inside that IP, the server will check what domain is being requested, and it will serve the correct page.

Under a static IP address structure, your site will have a unique IP that identifies it, even if it is hosted on a server with more sites.

Through my research I discovered that there is a small debate among SEOs about the influence of having a static IP address upon the search rankings of a website. Some people claim that it could actually help the rankings, but the majority agree that the sole fact of having a shared of a static IP address should not make any different at all in front of Google or other search engines.

I tend to go with the flow here, and I doubt that having a static IP per se would improve your search rankings.

There are cases where a shared IP could hurt your site though. Suppose one of the websites sharing your IP gets flagged for adult or spam content, or suffers some other strong penalty that extends to the whope IP address. Your website would inevitably suffer the consequences as well.

This is a rare situation, but it could happen.

If your website is growing fast or making a good amount of money, therefore, I think it could be a good idea to grab a dedicated IP. Just in case, as they say. I have booked one for Daily Blog Tips already.