Google vs. Virtual Hosted Sites

Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, posted a message on his blog saying that Google continues to penalize virtual hosted sites, the conflict between virtual hosting and dedicated IP affecting PageRanks on the sites.

Matt quoted Craig Silverstein, Google's Director of Technology who confirmed in the Slashdot interview made in 2003 the fact that "links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses."

The question addressed by a user was: "Why in this day and age does Google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With IP addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does Google discount the relevance of links that don't come from a unique IP address. Please don't just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation."

"I can't just deny it? What are my other choices? Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you'll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception-thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth," Craig responded.