Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Some background first. We have a well ranked website that mainly consists of news and information for a specific area in the health care market.
We also have designed and maintained several hundred websites for doctors who work in this area of healthcare. These are all legitimate separate websites and they have their own domain names. These sites do share content as we push our news RSS feeds to populate the sites and also provide "stock" articles for them (if they want them). Many of them use similar "stock" designs (table layouts). All of these sites are currently hosted by various web hosts (aplus.net, 1&1, godaddy, etc). All of these sites talk about the same health topic.
What we do is that we push our RSS feeds to our customer websites so they get relevant news topics auto updated on their pages. We benefit from the links back to our main news and information sites this all helps with our PR etc in Google. We also point to these sites from our main news and info website for a consumer who is looking for a doctor.
Our initial concern was that we did not want the google ranking algo to think that we are creating a link farm, due to some of the shared content and table layout designs. This is why we use all the different hosting services with the various IP addresses and servers.
So far, this has worked, as the Strong Bad Teen Girl Squad might say, "SOOOO Good". Our main site is well ranked, our website customers like the daily news refreshed on thier sites and they are ranked well for local search terms.
Here is where I need some help.
We are planning to grow to several hundred more website customers over the next year. Due to the volume, we want to bring the sites "in house" to servers that we lease and therefore can more easily manage vs using all these different hosting providers.
My concern is this, if we move these sites onto 1 or 2 or 3 servers and if our website customer sites share IP addresses on these "in house" servers or if each website we host has their own IPs, Google might penalize our customer sites and/or our main web site due to all the links coming in from these "few" servers. i.e. we are concerned Google would think we have buit a link farm. As I mentioned some (not all) of the content is similar, but the sites are all different as they represent different practices around the US.
Our current plan is to get 3 servers at 3 data centers from our host. We would put 10 IP addresses on each server and then have 10 domains share each IP address. This would spread sites across the machines and across IP addresses. We would slowly move sites to this new system, across IPs so the migration would be slow as well. We would then add servers and IPs as need.
I have seen the matt cutts vids where he mentions 2000 sites on an IP are too much. What we are doing is not that large, but it is not small either. I have also read the books about how you need to spread the IP addresses around. Different Class C IPs. This is what we have done, but I think that this may be too conservative, considering that we are becoming more of a web host than web designers.
I would love to hear what some of you in the real world have done in this area.
My questions:
1) Would Google think the proposal of the 3 servers with the 10 ips as a link farm?
2) Does anyone know of some sort of threshold for websites on a given server or IP that is "too many" before Google starts to penalize?
3) Is the different Class C rule too conservative?
4) What do you think of our current plan mentioned in question 1?
Cheers,
HTMLme
But otherwise, even being on the same IP is not a problem in my experience, and certainly the "separate c-block" idea looks like overkill to me, and I've tried it in various ways. I think a lot of this concern comes from reading information exchanged over the years by very aggressive SEO folks who really push the envelope hard. It may be important if you are being "very aggressive" - but not otherwise.
Also note, Google has many ways to spot a cross-ownership "footprint" that go far beyond a shared c-block. You will most likely not hide the fact that these "hundreds of sites" are related anyway. So I'd say just don't go crazy with cross-linking and do whatever you do in that area for your visitors only, not for PR purposes. Ten sites per IP sounds fine, as well as ten IP's for each of 3 servers.
Its only extreme cases where huge numbers of sites are involved that may attract attention... and I dare say where they are all interlinked into a link farm.
1. It credited a 302 redirect on one site to another site on the same IP.
2. It changed the title around from my client's site (a Christian site) to an adult site--and did it twice with different sites.
both of the above were solved by moving to a dedicated IP.
Also I heard that sites on shared hosting don't rank as well.
