When you have a website, it is very important to know its characteristics. Examples of these are its IP address and how it is hosted.
There is a very helpful tool that you can use to accomplish this. It is known as the Reverse IP Domain Check. This tool can help you to discover the IP address of your website as well as the websites that share a web server with yours.
Figuratively, it helps you to know your neighbors on the Internet. This information is especially valuable when you are optimizing your website using the SEO process.
As you make efforts to appear in the first page of results, you will want to know more about how your site is hosted. Why is this information useful to attain? Read on.
Learn Why It Is Important To Know the Other Websites That Share a Server With Yours
You can spend a lot of time and effort trying to improve the rank of your website in the search engine results. By employing a host of SEO strategies, you can gradually increase the rank of your website.
In this process, you should always find out the other websites that you share a server with. This is because their condition actively affects the rank of your website as well.
If they contain some content that is malicious or their webmaster uses black hat SEO methods and gets flagged, the penalties that they will suffer can negatively affect your website. Despite running a clean shop, the rank of your website will go down simply because of the mismanagement of your server neighbors.
Therefore, it is very useful to know who else is hosted in the same server as you and what type of website it is.
Governments, libraries and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) all have one thing in common; they use IP-based filtering tools to control which websites are accessed in their networks.
If the filter analyzes your IP address and notices that you share a server with a malicious website, yours will also get blocked even if you are innocent.
The filter is non-discriminative. It will apply blocking protocols on your website as well. This can deny you thousands of legitimate visitors and negatively affect your rank in the search engine results.
As such, use the reverse IP lookup tool to identify the other websites that you share a server with. If there are any malicious or blacklisted ones, shift to another address as soon as you can.
Here is how to use this tool to protect the reputation of your website.
How To Use This Tool
This tool is hosted online. Therefore, simply searching for the Reverse IP Domain Check in any search engine will give you a link to its homepage. One such tool is from DomainTools. Click on it. Once you arrive, paste the Universal Resource Locator (URL) of your website in a special search bar in the page. After you do that, click submit.
This will activate the tool to analyze the Internet to find other websites that are hosted in the same server as yours. Every server has a unique IP address. Therefore, the tool checks for other websites that have an IP address that is similar to yours.
After it finds them, the tool will give you a comprehensive list of the domain names of these websites. You can then proceed to investigate them further so as to preserve your search engine rank and website reputation.
Using the Reverse IP Check is just one of the ways to protect your website. Here are some other ways to protect your website from malicious activities that could threaten your search engine rank or even your data.
How To Protect Your Website
There is a number of strategies that you can use to protect your website. They include:
- Maintaining your website software
- Structure your error messages properly
- Protect the JavaScript in your website
1. Maintain Your Website Software and Keep It Updated
This is a simple way to protect your website. Modern dynamic websites normally depend on a combination of software platforms to make them work. This software includes the server operating system and the Content Management System (CMS). It should be updated regularly so as to patch any vulnerabilities that it could have.
Malicious people online normally take advantage of these vulnerabilities to deface or destroy websites. Therefore, protect your website by maintaining the software that keeps it going.
See Also: Joomla vs. WordPress: Which is the Better CMS for Your Website?
2. Structure Your Error Messages Well
If your website has an interactive form where your visitors can log in, then you need to structure the error messages such that they do not guide hackers to break into your website.
If a visitor enters the wrong combination of username and password, the resulting error message should not indicate what was right and what was wrong. It should be generic for example 'Wrong username or password'.
In this way, if it is a hacker trying to break into your website, they cannot know which factor they got wrong. In this way, you keep them out of your website and server.
See Also: An Insight Into Common WordPress Errors and Their Solutions
3. Protect the JavaScript in Your Website
One of the main elements in modern dynamic websites is JavaScript. Since it is so commonly used to run online applications, hackers normally target it using a method known as Cross Site Scripting (XSS).
They target forms that have been made using Java to break into servers and destroy data. You can prevent this by running checks on any data being entered into your forms.
Moreover, strip out HTML code to prevent hackers from gaining clues about your website. This is an effective way to protect your website.
Conclusion
Finding out the other websites in your host server is just one of the steps you can take to protect your valuable website.
The other methods indicated above serve to help you accomplish complete security. Make the effort to protect your website before it is too late.