How Mirrored Hosts Can Be Found

[msgraph]

This has been posted before but I'm going to bring it back up. There are always these questions about how search engines can figure out duplicity. Well here are some ways on how they might do it for those of you who never read this.

Three of the people listed on this paper have been working for Google.

This was patented for AltaVista so you can't say that this is what Google is using.

Read it! [gatekeeper.dec.com]

[Brett_Tabke]

I found the most fascinating aspect to be on virtual hosting:

"However, when many hosts resolve to the same IP address it
is indicative of virtual hosting by an internet service provider:
for instance, at the time of writing, Webcom uses the same IP
address, 209.1.28.62, to implement 18,000 distinct web sites."

[Marcia]

It figures then why one company that has over 10,000 active domain names they're using hosts them all on a small-town based ISP that maintains a little local town directory also.

[id2]

Thanks for the advise msgraph.

Heavy reading for a newbie though.

My ISP hosts 10 of my sites on an IIS4 server.

I am concerned that certain search engines will penalize them as the vitual IP is detected and 'could be' considered as cloaking.

Would you recommend I insist my sites are moved to another type of server with their own IP addresses. (I really don't know what I'm talking about here).

My sites rank fairly well but not with Google. Could this be the problem.

Cheers

Mike

[msgraph]

If your sites are unique in their own way to one another you should be ok. Any crosslinking between these sites will probably be disregarded from Google but they shouldn't "penalize" you for it.

[google.com...]

Look at page 1 and 2

To give you a hint, their domain name is one of the most popular for this search.

One is prefixed with "software" (page 1) and the other with "help" (page 2).

If you do a trace you will see that they have the same exact IP address. Now it could be that the PageRank of these sites are so high that it outweighs the fact that they reside on the same IP However, these listings wouldn't be so high up if similar IP address's played a large role in how a site gets ranked.

The point is, if you get a high amount of quality links pointing to your site outside of your network, then you will be in the clear.