A topic that moves SEO-forums and -blogs in regular increments is the question whether a personal, meaning an exclusively used IP-address has any advantages for the searchengine-optimization. I want to start out with a little excursion on IP-addresses for those who do not feel at home with the Internet's fundamentals, everyone else can just skip this paragraph.

Basics IP-addresses, Domains & DNS
IP-addresses are often called the Internet's telephone numbers. Every participant, be it the surfing user or the server which hosts the data, receives one of those IP-addresses. They are made up of four rows of numbers which are between 0 and 256. Our server for example, which hosts a few of our SEO-tools, has the IP-address 78.47.95.244, the T-Dialin-access through which I am writing this posting has the 217.232.32.54. These IP-addresses have been assigned to the providers – if you want to know which IP belongs to which Provider you can do that through our Whois-Tool: enter the address and press 'Whois'. Seeing that it would be rather laborious having to remember all those addresses just to reach web-content, there are establishments that can translate domains into IP-addresses. These establishments are called “Domain Name System” or just DNS for short and it is their job, that if you put tools.sistrix.com into your browser, you will get to the right server. We also have a little tool online if you want to see which IP-address belongs to which domain. Those who wish to read more about the beginning and the coherences of the Internet, I can recommend the book “Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet” by Hafner and Lyon. It is written in an interesting and amusing way that is perfect for gaining “party-knowledge” for Internet regulars' tables or -parties, respectively.

Why your own IP-address from a SEO point-of-view?
For one there is the notion in SEO-circles for a while, that links from pages that are on IP-addresses which in turn have a specific “distance” are worth more than pages that have the same IP-address. To measure this distance the last octet of the IP-address is usually taken out so that the remaining three can be compared. For this server the 78.47.95.244 would become 78.47.95 and the links should, if possible, not be from servers within the 256 IP-addresses from that array. Thus, putting your webpage on your own, “far away” IP-address, you ought to – if you wish to follow this thought – have links between your own projects count more. Google does not act like that to the best of my knowledge. On the one hand you have the fact that the omission of the last octet is not up-to-date anymore since subnets can, for a long time now, be either larger or smaller than the 256 IP-addresses. On the other hand this would imply that Google values links from Strato-customers, all of whom have an IP from the 81.169.145.* bloc, less that those from other providers: pure nonsense.

Another line of thought for exclusively used IP-addresses goes in the direction of Google putting “penalty's” on IP-addresses if pages ,that are on the same address, break the rules. This is another case where I am certain that Google will not value IP-addresses, that are used by providers for different customers, negatively. There have been cases in the past where websites were identified through their IP-address and then removed from the index – in these cases, all of the pages were on a person/company's own IP-address and not on a shared-hosting-environment.

So why your own IP-address?
There are actually a few applications that are impossible or at least very hard to realize without the use of an exclusive IP-address. The operation of an anonymous FTP-server or the use of encrypted HTTP via SSL on the standard-port are two examples. It is also often the case that on your own server (which inevitably need its on IP-address) you have more options and pages can be accessed more quickly than on servers that are shared with other customers. From the searchengine-optimization perspective however these topics hold inferior relevance – bad SEO does not get better thanks to its own IP-address.