Experts advice on hosting a lot of domains please

[jane hamilton]

Hello,

I found this site for the first time today and having spent the last few hours reading it, I am amazed by the depth of knowledge on the site, so I thought I would ask help from the experts rather than spending weeks in the dark.

I am building a shopping directory project which has a central directory homepage.I have registered large numbers of keyword domain names which, with appropriate page and link optimisation, will drive the traffic to the appropriate pages within the directory.My site is a mixture of .co.uk and .com domain names.

I have a dedicated server based in the US which will give me 8 distinct IP addresses, more if I want to pay extra, however they will all be within the same address block so google etc will pick this up I think? The .co.uk domains will need to be hosted in the UK to appear in the UK searches on google I think? As all of these will be part of a virtual server arrangement (or would I be better off with a dedicated UK machine as well, aaaarghhh I am confused!) how do I make sure they all have different IP addresses, or do I need lots of virtual accounts at UK hosting companies to ensure this.

Any help or discount coupons for valium would be welcome :)

Many Thanks (newbie) Jane

[khuntley]

Hello Jane and welcome to WebmasterWorld,
Go to google.co.uk and perform a search and then perform the same search at google.com. That should answer some questions about where to host the sites. Save yourself some time and money, and host them on the dedicated server that you already have.

Google's ability to identify cross-linking by IP address has been a hotly debated topic. However, I have never seen any evidence of Google penalizing sites all within a block.

So I think you have just been worrying a bit much. Host them all at your current dedicated.

The strongest advice I can give you is to make certain that each domain has very unique content. Don't worry so much about Google penalizing you in an automated manner; if your competitors feel that you are creating mirror sites or doorway pages they will most certainly fill out google's spam form.

Kevin

[jane hamilton]

Thanks Kevin,

Google .com and .co.uk will return the same keyword search results if you just enter the search term in the main box leaving the default search the web option clicked, which most people tend to, I agree.

I am anxious not to lose the 20% or so and growing(seperate report estimates)that search in pages from the UK option. This will only return domains hosted in the UK and 90% .co.uk domain extensions are in the search results.

I found your comments regarding google not linking IP address blocks interesting and perhaps it would be best therefore if I purchased a dedicated machine in the UK as well to host the .co.uk domains.

Thanks again for your welcome and for taking the time to help me out with your advice it is much appreciated.

Jane