Recently an interesting experiment was published on Reboot Online that says cheap hosting with low-quality, spammy bad neighborhoods of sites, can actually impact Google rankings. But John Mueller of Google disputed this study saying it is not really true and it doesn't work that way at Google.
Here is what the study concluded:
The results of this experiment suggests that cheap shared hosting options can in fact have a detrimental effect on the organic performance and rankings of the websites hosted there if your website ends up being hosted alongside lower-quality and potentially spammy ones (providing all websites being observed are otherwise on a level playing field).
John Mueller then chimed in on Twitter with numerous responses saying he doesn't think this is true. He said "I'm not aware of any ranking algorithm that would take IPs like that into account." He gave Blogger as an example. He also added that this study may be flawed a bit because "artificial websites like this are pretty much never indicative of any particular effect in normal Google Search."
The back and forth is interesting, let me share some of it:
We have seen very rare cases of Google slapping all sites on a single host but that is super rare and rarely would ever happen. But this study says something more concerning.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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