QUESTION: Multiple Sites ¦ IP Addresses ¦ Independent Sites

[Bradley]

If a company had a network of 75 websites which had:
1. Unique domain names
2. No interlinking between sites
3. No exact duplication of content between sites
4. All focused on one topic / industry

Would the search engines penalize the sites because their web hosting IP addresses were close in range (because one provider would host all the sites)?

[heini]

No crosslinking? So it would not confuse Google's pageranking, thus no reason to penalize.
But then - who knows? The penalizing/kicking out of index happens rather randomly.

[jkruit]

Your post triggered a question for me. If I have a domain name registered as an alias, and it links to one of my pages (not the home page), will the search engines penalize me?

Thanks
janine

[DaveAtIFG]

Questions containing the phrase "Will the search engines penalize for .... ?" are usually difficult to address because each engine has different preferences.

Google is probably the most sophisticated and strict about duplicate content and multiple domains pointing to the same pages.

Bradley, as to your IPs being in close range, that was debated thoroughly in the Google forum early last year, do some searching there for more info. My hosting company has numerous boxes with unique IP ranges so the sites they host for me are not numerically adjacent, perhaps it's an option for you and a way to avoid this potential problem.

>3. No exact duplication of content between sites
I'd be a bit more concerned about this one. Duplicate content is frowned on by most SEs when detected. The phrase "exact duplication" implies these sites are very similar and that can make SEs seriously unhappy. Similar headers and footers on a page or a site built from a template are acceptable to SEs IF the main content of the page varies substantially from page to page. In your case the content from site to site must vary substantially to avoid problems.

The worst case, very similar content on consecutive IPs is NOT something I would try!

jkruit, some SEs (Google for sure) are gonna be unhappy about this too. Multiple domain names pointing at the same content is not the ideal result to return to a searcher.