Large number of sites on a single IP address

Does Google see this as spam?

[stcrim]

There is a company that runs web sites for about 15,000 car dealers. The vast majority of those are on a single IP address.

Of the sites on that IP address NONE of them now have PR (and they did before} and NONE of them have cached pages showing in google (and they did before).

You can still find some of them if they are also listed in DMOZ but only by their company name. No logical search will find them other than company name including any combbination of title and body keywords.

Is there a way to find out if an IP is banned or demoted by Google?

Does Google view it as spam becasue there is so much on one IP address?

None of these sites are doing anything google would consider to be spam - so is this just google automation at work?

-s-

[dmorison]

Virtual hosting (where many websites share the same IP address) is becoming increasingly common (and encouraged by the Internet community) as the IP address space becomes crowded.

Of course I cannot categorically state weather Google do or don't penalize an IP address specifically, but I think they would be stupid and doing the Internet a disfavour if they did.

[ciml]

I wonder two things.

If those domains link back to the company that runs them? If so, then a link based penalty would seem possible.

> NONE of them have cached pages showing in google (and they did before).

Could there have been a server problem?

Unfortunately, it's hard to say at the moment while the Toolbar and link: search are not in line with the results. I wouldn't be inclined to panic until after the next update.

As dmorison suggests, the IP shouldn't be a problem in itself.

[takagi]

GoogleGuy answered some 7 hours ago a similar question in the thread Some Q&A answers - GoogleGuy answers some questions from last week.. [webmasterworld.com].

Jesse_Smith (msg 56)

Do you just ban domains, or also IP addresses? If your domain is on an IP address that has hundreds of domains on it, and one of those domains does big time spamming and the IP address get's banned, what's the best way to get unbanned, since you can't include any evidence in the E-mail that you tried to get rid of anything, like hidden text links, since you did nothing wrong in the first place?

GoogleGuy (msg 59)

Jesse_Smith, the things you mentioned are good reasons why IP address penalties are usually not a good idea. All the comments about manual penalties apply, plus it's easy for a bad guy to switch to a different IP. I haven't seen an IP-based penalty in a long time. ...

[stcrim]

The above situation has been going on for over 6 months. So they have been through several spider/updates, In some cases google says there is no cached page and in others googles cache is just a blank page.

takagi - thank you! With todays internet an IP banning would not be very smart.

-s-

[conor]

If the cache page is blank, they have probably used a no cache tag in their meta tags, which means they have probably been cloaking or doing something against the Google TOS which has envoked a penalty.