Thanks guys,
3rigena, it's a bit of a grey area, but SSL is one of the quick fire ways to distinguish your site from a Spam site. The inclussion of SSL is one guy to gain trust with
SE's in my opinion.
Michele, the dedicated IP thing is a bit of an over step and somewhat paranoid approach to avoiding the Sandbox but if you look at the Netcraft risk rating, it usally dispalys a tiny red spec for sites hosted on shared servers but rarely does for sites hosted in dedicated IPs. It's all about trust and if I were Google I would trust a site on a dedicated server/ip more so than one on a shared server.