I know Google blacklists domain names from searches but does anyone know if it blacklists ip addresses? This creates an interesting scenario if you have an ip address assigned to you from a pool and you were unlucky to get a spammer’s ip address and you’re hosting a website on it. Is there a way to check what ip addresses are blacklisted?
I’ve never heard anything to that effect, and logic dictates that such a practice would be unworkable. You would only need one nefarious site on shared hosting to be penalised, and several hundred innocent sites would immediately go down with it.
There’s nothing about it that I can find in GWT Help, either, which again suggests it’s not something they do.
Penalising lots of innocent sites is unlikely to be a criteria as I know its not with TLDs. I once purchased some domains from a non-standard TLD domain registrar and then the domain registrar committed some kind of fraud and Google blacklisted the domains from pagerank, all of them, so my legitimate domains became worthless.
I strongly suspect Google silently blacklists ip addresses of web sites but how common the practice is Im not sure and I know gmail blacklists ip addresses.
I am trying to find a statement from Google somewhere saying that Google doesn’t do that and haven’t yet so its probably true. So the next question would be how do you know you have a safe ip address? I suppose if one thinks their ip address isn’t Google safe then its alot easier to change it than a domain name.
I did find this in the end:
The interview was a bit old but as long as nothing has changed since then it sounds like you can have a recycled ip address previously owned by a notorious web spammer and still be good to go on your new virtuous web site. I’m still a tad dubious, as the interview was rather dated, but perhaps its still true.
IPv4 addresses ran out a couple of years ago and so have to be shared - hence they do not in most cases identify a specific user or site.
IPv6 addresses are sufficient to give everyone on the planet a few million addresses each and so once their use becomes more widespread it might become practical to block specific users based on their specific range of IPv6 addresses.