"We believe there are approximately 30 Million crawlable servers globally, two-thirds of which have been blacklisted as spam servers."

I've mentioned in past articles about the importance of making sure your Web site does not share the same IP address or IP block with sites that spam. WebPosition Gold's Page Critic has also pointed this out. It even came up in an interview of an AltaVista representative last year.

This quote from FAST's Business Director, however, drives the point home even harder. According to Mr. Baker, the MAJORITY of servers on the Web are on their blacklist as spam servers. Traditionally, it has been believed that blacklisting a server was more the exception than the rule.

Since FAST maintains such a large index, I can only conclude that if his statement is accurate, that the 20 million servers "blacklisted" are not simply banned from FAST's index. Instead of complete removal, they may be leaving many sites in the index, but penalizing your rankings "just in case" you're a spammer.

The unfortunate thing about this is that you could have done nothing wrong beyond selecting a hosting service that put you on the same server with one or more other Web sites who were caught spamming. Search engines often penalize not only the domain name, but the IP address for the domain. This can effectively penalize other sites that share the same IP. Unfortunately, sharing an IP is a common practice today among hosting services since new IP addresses are now regulated to avoid a shortage.

So, you've optimized your Web site but you're still encountering problems gaining top rankings? If you find yourself in this scenario, you should definitely check whether your IP is shared. Since Lycos now pulls its results from FAST, the same rule applies to it. You can ask your hosting service whether your IP is shared, however, be careful since all hosts may not always give an accurate answer regarding this question.

One quick way to determine for yourself if your IP is unique is to determine the IP for your Web site domain. You may do this by opening a DOS or command line Window. On some versions of Windows like NT, 2000 and XP, you can type in PING followed by a space and your Web site's domain name. If your Windows does not include the PING command, you can find a free download of it from sites like www.download.com. Write down the IP number that is returned. It should be in the format of ###.###.###.###. For example, if you type in:

PING www.webposition.com

You will receive 64.40.97.108. Take this number and enter http:// followed by your IP number in your browser. If your home page pops up, then your IP should be unique. If it is shared, the server should not know which site sharing the IP that you want to be directed to.

Even if you have your own unique IP, sometimes a search engine will ban an entire block of IP's if they find it to contain too many spammers. Sometimes getting out of a bad range of IP addresses requires switching hosting services. If you choose to switch hosts, the goal is to change your IP to an entirely different IP range, or class C subnet. For example, rather than changing some of the last three digits of your IP like 64.40.97.108 to 64.40.97.115, you would want to change one or more of the digits in the first three groups of the IP address. For example, changing the 97 in the above address to say 110 (i.e., 64.40.110.108), should put you into a sufficiently different "subnet."

If your current hosting provider has enough class-C subnets, they may be able to move your site without you having to change hosting companies. In most cases, changing your class-C subnet is sufficient. You can reduce your chances of obtaining a blacklisted IP by avoiding hosting services that cater to adult Web sites or other industries known to have a high rate of spamming.

The full interview of the FAST representative may be found in the April edition of Planet Ocean's report. (You'll have to be a paying subscriber to access it, but the wealth of other SEO information you receive is well worth the money):

http://www.searchenginehelp.com/positioning/

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